Anthony Daniels
English writer and retired physician who frequently uses the pen name Theodore Dalrymple.
Frivolity without gaiety and earnestness without seriousness—a most unattractive combination.
In the British public service nothing succeeds like failure: indeed, failure is success, if looked on in the right way, namely as something requiring yet further intervention in people's lives to amend.
Modernity is the most transient of qualities.
Loose language suggests loose thought.
When a population feels alienated from the legal system under which it lives, because that system fails to protect it from real dangers while lending succor and encouragement to every possible kind of wrongdoing, the population may well lose faith in the very idea of law. That is how civilization unravels.
The British are fast turning themselves into a nation of slaves, where even the slave-masters are not free.
It is better to be opposed by an enemy than to be adrift in meaninglessness, for the simulacrum of an enemy lends purpose to actions whose nihilism would otherwise be self-evident.
What youth considers liberation, maturity considers tasteless excess.
In a corporate state, all attempts to reduce bureaucracy increase it.
Whereas fortitude was once regarded as a virtue, it has come to be regarded as a kind of reprehensible and deliberate obtuseness, to be utterly condemned as treason to the self (there is no fury like a non-judgmentalist scorned).
Childhood in large parts of modern Britain, at any rate, has been replaced by premature adulthood, or rather adolescence. Children grow up very fast but not very far. That is why it is possible for 14 year olds now to establish friendships with 26 year olds - because they know by the age of 14 all they are ever going to know.
Never has so much indifference masqueraded as so much compassion; never has there been such willful blindness. The once pragmatic English have become a nation of sleepwalkers.
If consequences are removed from enough actions, then the very concept of human agency evaporates, life itself becomes meaningless, and is thenceforth a vacuum in which people oscillate between boredom and oblivion.
Unilateral tolerance in a world of intolerance is like unilateral disarmament in a world of armed camps: it regards hope as a better basis for policy than reality.
When the cold war ended, I thought, as no doubt did many others, that the age of ideology was over. Again like many others, I underestimated man’s need for transcendence, which, in the absence of religion or high culture, he is most likely to find in a political or social cause.