How ought we to remember those who achieved greatness?
Theodore Dalrymple
Many have mistaken their own outrage for virtue, and then supposed that their virtue absolved them from the necessity to think clearly.
It is impossible to expunge from the human mind the idea that punishment is the correct response to wrongdoing.
Racism is truly opposed not by anti-racists, but by non-racists, that is, people who do not judge or behave towards others according to their race.
Changes in usage and semantics, when imposed, are usually exercises in power.
The British National Health Service has spoken: Wear the badge or declare yourself to be a bigot.
Murray’s book is directed against the modern orthodoxy that all differences in wealth and power arise by the exercise of privilege and illicit influence.
Pascal said that he who sets out to be an angel ends a beast: to which we might add that he who sets out to create a heaven-on-earth creates a hell.
Public adulation often deliberately confounds the NHS itself with the devotion and skill of the people working within it.
That we celebrate foreign labor in medicine but condemn the importation of fruit pickers offers a peculiar inconsistency.
When I look back on my own life, I think I knew by the age of ten that one should not strangle old ladies in their beds.
There are some who believe that certain types of crime are so heinous that the normal safeguards against false conviction can, indeed must, be abrogated.
There is little doubt that there are many who will want to use the epidemic as a pretext for exerting more power and control over the population.
If the epidemic, or rather the response to the epidemic, destroys thousands of small businesses, what then?
Coronavirus suggests one important truth: dependence on a single country is to industry what dependence on monoculture is to agriculture.
Why did such a brilliantly gifted person waste his talents on politics?
I support the abolition of the death penalty, but its demise seems highly correlated with a weakening of crime and punishment in the UK.
Hubris is an occupational hazard of politicians, but it is not completely unknown in the medical profession.
Glorifying the NHS means that freeborn Englishmen have willingly acceded to their own pauperisation.
To accept the idea of normality is neither to reprehend those who are abnormal, nor to treat them badly.
When vaulting ambition (as his must surely have been) is allied to utter mediocrity, the result is… 700 pages that are a torture to read.
Was Johnson and Johnson either uniquely or principally responsible for the epidemic of opioid abuse and death by overdose in Oklahoma, or elsewhere?
By the use of a single phrase, Ursula von der Leyen has helped to inhibit serious discussion of a very serious, indeed vitally important, question.
To hold a referendum, or plebiscite, and then ignore the result is now a European tradition, but to call this democracy is absurd.
What is “They deserve our solidarity,” uttered without any indication of what such solidarity actually entails, if not an empty, sentimental slogan?
In matters of hypocrisy and inequality, distinctions remain important.
The United Nations was born with Original Virtue, and certainly with Original Legal Immunity, which is the nearest we come to innocence these days.
A recent plea for greater appreciation of European identity rings hollow.
As for who is responsible for this scourge, there’s plenty of blame to go around, not excluding those who have become addicted to opioids.
We live in an age of politically shrill history: Imperial Legacies is a fine, subtle, and bracing attempt to counter this polemical misuse of history.
Britain has thus fully joined the modern European tradition of holding a seeming consultation with the people only to ignore the results.
It has now become an almost unassailable orthodoxy, at least in medical journals, that obesity is an illness in and of itself.
In normal circumstances, no one would dream of writing a biography of so dreary a man as Jeremy Corbyn. The dreary, alas, are inheriting the earth.
Houellebecq's Sérotonine skewers our shallowness as a society—it serves as an abattoir for sacred cows.
Our knowledge of the human brain is limited, but neuroscientist Suzanne O’Sullivan’s observation of her patients yields astute insights.
Professor Piketty has the equivalent in politics of stone-deafness in music.
The gilets jaunes may want six impossible things before breakfast but, as the late Marshal McLuhan might have put it, the medium is the message.
Regardless of what happens, nationalist feeling has been revealed to be far stronger than pan-European feeling, which is, at most, a very pale ghost.
Chesterton is reputed to have said that when people cease to believe in God, they will not believe in nothing, they will believe anything.
Hazony's The Virtue of Nationalism offers a lesson: hell hath no fury like a universalist contradicted.
The problem is that those in whose name the expropriations take place starve to death afterwards.
We should have sympathy for those harmed by the products they use, but tort law all too often has a corrupting effect on society.
The scale of the ECJ's judicial activism makes the court the ruler of Europe.
We probably shouldn't criminalize speech that encourages violence, but this doesn't rule out a deep concern for where it leads.
We might think the high salaries paid to soccer stars are unjust, but the just price requires a philosopher-king, and we know where that thinking leads.
In a recent book, coauthors Richard Bouigue and Pierre Rondeau posit that the soccer bubble may soon burst.
Horrific cases like that of John Worboys should remind us that the current systems of parole are dangerously arbitrary.
“The events” served to fix in the popular mind the romantic notion that adolescence is the high point of any human existence.
In Where We Are, Roger Scruton helps us see Britain's possible futures, but the question remains: is he pessimistic enough?
Mitsutoki Shigeta paid 13 women to father his children, in a case that highlights the challenges of balancing autonomy against custom.
The danger in letting sentimentality guide politics is that there is no totalitarian as dangerous as he who does not realize that he is one.
Beyond their corruption, Oxfam’s ideas of how poverty is to be overcome — by means of foreign aid — is, and in retrospect has always been, deeply flawed.
Mrs. May pins her hope of remaining in office on not offending anyone too deeply, but with Brexit, this is impossible.
History is often taught or used these days as if the past were simply something to liberate ourselves from, but the causes of our cultural amnesia run deep.
If Trump is to be disqualified from the presidency, it should be on the basis of moral rather than amateurish psychological grounds.
The Lancet turns to Marx for wisdom in advancing public health, with predictable results.
Why would nationalist or separatist movements be pro-EU? It seems strange, given that the EU would destroy or replace national sovereignty.
Brexit's hope for the UK was in becoming a country of greater liberty and responsibility, there is scant evidence of that happening.
Zimbabwe's possibilities include rejecting both the bad legacies of colonialism and Mugabe's authoritarian rule.
In what sense, then, was the overthrow of the Smith regime by Mugabe an advance, an improvement, a liberation, as it is often called?
The rule of law is not at all the same thing as the rule of laws, or the preeminence of law in our lives.
But what is the EU if not a procrustean political bed whose purpose is to fuse very different countries in the hope that something powerful will emerge
Minogue’s book was prescient but not in all respects, as a preface written by him nearly 40 years later admits.
Equality of opportunity is not a cry of the people; it is the perpetual alibi of a bureaucracy.