Theodore Dalrymple
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| Retired prison psychiatrist, social commentator, traveller, eloquent and insightful writer. |
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Arranged only in alphabetical order of first letter.
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Accomplished modesty seems to me better than failed ambition, which is much more frequently encountered in the history of art.
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The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose and for someone else to pay when things go wrong.
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All judgment is comparative.
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Analogies, by definition, are inexact.
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The attempt to enforce absolute virtue results in great evil.
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A carefully constructed argument tends to bore rather than to impress, and even to make him who employs it look arrogant or self-satisfied in the eyes of those who attend.
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Dogs are the greatest diplomats, or at least aids to diplomacy.
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Dramatic landscapes do not usually make for the best landscape paintings, which are generally of less startling views.
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The English, it was observed by an aristocratic Frenchman as long ago as the eighteenth century, take their pleasures sadly.
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Enough of philosophy, as characters say in Russian novels.
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The epidemiology, sociology and psychology of bad taste interest me because there is so much of it about. Bad taste is the shadow-side of self-expression, as it were; indeed, it often seems as if it is the only side of it.
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Even the most nostalgic among us do not wish for a return to the old days with regard, say, to medical treatment.
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Even the most punitive among us do not want punishment in effect to continue for ever, beyond the term laid down by law.
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Everyone’s knowledge is always finite, while everyone’s ignorance is always infinite.
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The exposure of Freud as a fraud, or a near-fraud, still comes as a shock in France.
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Fashions change in attitudes as surely as in dress, perhaps in an even more fickle way.**
Few are the people who love dogs and cats equally, and there are those who love neither.
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Great poets think poetry the most important thing in the world, great entomologists, insects.
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Gypsies should be free to do as they like, but please God not near me: that is the lazy thought of most people in Europe.
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He who argues by the ad hominem is refuted by the ad hominem.
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Icarus view of life [:] life is nothing but ascent nearer and nearer to the sun of perfection.
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The internet acts on sleep rather as amphetamines do, that is to say it prevents it.
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If history teaches anything, it is not that no one learns anything from history, it is rather that people learn the wrong lessons from history.
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If someone were to tell that, for the rest of my life, I could listen only to rock music and read only airport novels, I should pray for a swift death.
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In an antinomian world, notoriety and fame are one.**
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In Western Europe...it has become almost impossible for anyone to construct an aesthetically decent house, let alone public building...
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In the absence of talent...and of the willingness to work and study...transgression and outrage are the only way to fame.
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It is difficult to tell the truth in public, at least on certain matters.
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It is a mistake to suppose that all men...want to be free.
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It is non-paranoia rather than paranoia that needs to be explained.
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It is wealth and not poverty than stands in need of explanation.
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It is not easy to answer a puritan without sounding as if you are positively in favour of sin.
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It isn’t easy to imagine a charmless swindler, after all; it is almost a sine qua non of the trade.
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A joke is more effective than a statistic.
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Just as there is an infinite number of ways of dividing a sphere into two, so...there are an infinite number of ways of dividing men into two.
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Man does not live by rationality alone, and we must sometimes take him as he is.
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Man is the only creature capable of prurience.
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The man who has not studied is blinded by prejudice; the man who has studied, but has no instinct, is blinded by learning.
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...the marionettes of happenstance.
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No one remembers or long honours a translator, however good.
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Nostalgia is generally derided as at best a useless, and at worst a harmful emotion or mood.
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One of the ways to destroy trust, an invaluable social asset, is to mistrust when there is no need of it.
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The only way talent can be brought to fruition [is by] work and study.
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Passion has, if not its rights exactly, at least its excuses.
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Pedantry has its pleasures and psychological rewards.
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People who achieve something in life usually overestimate the importance of what they are doing, and if they did not they would hardly achieve anything.
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A persona assumed for long enough, however, soon becomes indistinguishable from a real.
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The prescient man is not the man who knows most. He is like the chess-player who takes in the situation on a board at once, the result of much study and the possession of instinct.
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Pride in learning is especially vulgar and reprehensible.
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Prisoners often say the most interesting things and their language often has a beauty of its own, but consecutive thought is not the first characteristic of their utterances.
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Progress there has been, self-evidently so, but not in everything.
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Prudence can be carried to excess, until it becomes the enemy of bravery, determination and daring.
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Rats I abominate, but mice – wild mice, that is, including house mice, not the white laboratory kind with pink eyes – I have always sympathised with and had much time for.
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Rats will survive long after Man destroys himself.
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(On the Salwar kameez) is often of the greatest elegance, and vastly more grateful on the eye than the way in which many western women now dress.
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A society in which nothing was beyond the pale would be extraordinarily vicious.
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The Spartans are brave because they are afraid to be anything else; it is little else but a different kind of cowardice.
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That’s real integration for you: [Welsh] man, born and bred, who thinks of England as a foreign country.
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There is no law written into the constitution of the universe that guarantees overall improvement, steady or sudden as the case may be; and that is why prudence is so great a political virtue.
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There is no simple measure or yardstick of a life, or of life itself.
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There are two types of men: those who divide men into two types of men, and those who don’t.
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The thirst for order is at least as great as the thirst for freedom.
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A time that was happy only when viewed through the soft-focus lens of nostalgia.
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To say that the man who gouged out his girlfriend’s eyes should never be set at liberty is not the same as saying that he should be treated with cruelty inside prison (as, in strict justice, he would deserve to be treated, a proof, if any were needed, that justice is not the only value that we hold dear).
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The use of a single word can amount to a subtle lie.
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[Was] their previous seemingly instinctive good taste was merely lack of opportunity to express or act upon bad taste, or whether their good taste was something more positive than that?
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What is unusual often has the charms of novelty.
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When something is called classic it has a positive, even a laudatory, connotation.
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The worst of all fates for an egotist [is] to remain anonymous.
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The worst of all fates for an egotist [is] to remain anonymous.
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You can think really highly only of those about whom you know little.
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You will hardly see an inelegant hut in the whole of Africa.
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