Top 100 Dalrymple Quotes
#1. Theodore Dalrymple is a brilliant observer of both medicine and society, and his book wittily engages with two versions of the current nonsense: orthodox medicine on drug addiction, and romantic poets on the wisdom you supposedly enjoy from getting high.
Kenneth Minogue
#2. I hate having second thoughts," he muttered. "Necessary, for second chances," Dalrymple put in.
Courtney Milan
#3. William Dalrymple called me a war junkie in his silly book. No, I don't have a desire for it. I'm appalled and infuriated by it.
Robert Fisk
#4. William Dalrymple has superseded Mark Tully as the voice of India ... He may well be the greatest travel writer of his generation.
Robert Twigger
#5. I mean you ACRES of harm,' Dalrymple growled. 'Untold QUANTITIES of harm. I will visit a whole CONTINENT of harm upon you before we are through.
Derek Landy
#6. I learned early in my life that if people were offered the opportunity of tranquility, they often reject it and choose torment instead.
Theodore Dalrymple
#7. the Kauravas and the Pandavas turned from demi-gods into cave men, the great war reduced to a tribal feud fought with sticks and stones.
William Dalrymple
#8. If the war against drugs is lost, then so are the wars against theft, speeding, incest, fraud, rape, murder, arson, and illegal parking. Few, if any, such wars are winnable. So let us all do anything we choose.
Theodore Dalrymple
#9. an attachment to his culture is, for the European, the beginning of the slippery slope.
Theodore Dalrymple
#10. the only way to eliminate hypocrisy from human existence is to abandon all principles whatsoever;
Theodore Dalrymple
#11. 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.
Theodore Dalrymple
#12. The worth of a cause is not necessarily proportional to the lengths to which people will go to promote it.
Theodore Dalrymple
#13. It is clear to me that people often want incompatible things. They want danger and excitement on the one hand, and safety and security on the other, and often simultaneously. Contradictory desires mean that life can never be wholly satisfying or without frustration.
Theodore Dalrymple
#14. As the political sky darkened, the court was lost in a last idyll of pleasure gardens, courtesans and mushairas, or poetic symposia, Sufi devotions and visits to pirs, as literary and religious ambition replaced the political variety.
William Dalrymple
#15. All forms of human happiness contain within themselves the seeds of their own decomposition.
Theodore Dalrymple
#16. Obesity is the result of a loss of self-control. Indeed, loss of self-control might be said to be the defining social (or anti-social) characteristic of our age: public drunkenness, excessive gambling, promiscuity and common-or-garden rudeness are all examples of our collective loss of self-control.
Theodore Dalrymple
#17. India has always had a strange way with her conquerors. In defeat, she beckons them in, then slowly seduces, assimilates and transforms them.
William Dalrymple
#18. This? I thought, after a twenty-year civil war: This? Armageddon I expected; but Armani I did not.
William Dalrymple
#19. Havana is like Beirut, without having gone through the civil war to achieve the destruction.
Theodore Dalrymple
#20. The purpose of those who argue for cultural diversity is to impose ideological uniformity.
Theodore Dalrymple
#21. On the road, as in many other aspects of Indian life, Might is Right.
William Dalrymple
#22. The same year that Ghalib died in Delhi, 1869, there was born in Porbandar in Gujarat a boy called Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. It would be with the political movements headed by Gandhi, rather than those represented by Zafar, or indeed by Lord Canning, that the future of India would lie.
William Dalrymple
#23. Delhi was once a paradise, Where Love held sway and reigned; But its charm lies ravished now And only ruins remain. No
William Dalrymple
#24. So what exactly are the rewards of resentment. It is always a relief to know that the reason we have failed in life is not because we lack the talent, energy, or determination to succeed, but because of a factor that is beyond our control and that has loaded the dice decisively against us.
Theodore Dalrymple
#25. According to the Puranas, the Kali Yug is the last age before the world is destroyed by the 'fire of one thousand suns', after which the cycle reaches its conclusion and time momentarily stops, before the wheel turns again and a new cycle begins. Rather
William Dalrymple
#26. Partition was a total catastrophe for Delhi,' she said. 'Those who were left behind are in misery. Those who were uprooted are in misery. The Peace of Delhi is gone. Now it is all gone.
William Dalrymple
#27. Life is a biography, not a series of disconnected moments, more or less pleasurable but increasingly tedious and unsatisfying unless one imposes a purposive pattern upon them.
Theodore Dalrymple
#28. For the British after 1857, the Indian Muslim became an almost subhuman creature, to be classified in unembarrassedly racist imperial literature alongside such other despised and subject specimens, such as Irish Catholics or 'the Wandering Jew'.
William Dalrymple
#29. (Psychoanalysis, it seems, does wonders for a man's prose style: it renders it labyrinthine without subtlety.) There is no place, then, for human agency, except the kind that leads you to talk about yourself in the presence of another for twenty years. Shallowness can go no deeper.
Theodore Dalrymple
#30. A taste for kitsch among the well-to-do is a sign of spiritual impoverishment; but among the poor, it represents a striving for beauty, an aspiration without the likelihood of fulfilment.
Theodore Dalrymple
#31. Political correctness is often the attempt to make sentimentality socially obligatory or legally enforceable.
Theodore Dalrymple
#32. He is a thinker,' wrote Jacquemont in his memoir, 'who finds nothing but solitude in that exchange of words without ideas which is dignified by the name of conversation in the society of this land.
William Dalrymple
#33. The world has a lot to thank murderers for, when you come to think of it.
Theodore Dalrymple
#34. even received a few requests that I send medicine, since none was available in the local pharmacies - an admission, unthinkable a few years ago, that all is not well in the much-vaunted health-care system.
Theodore Dalrymple
#35. All that is necessary for evil to triumph, said Burke, is for good men to do nothing; and most good men nowadays can be relied upon to do precisely that. Where a reputation for intolerance is more feared than a reputation for vice itself, all manner of evil may be expected to flourish.
Theodore Dalrymple
#36. However, it has long been known that diazepam and other similar drugs cause falls in the elderly, and such falls are often the precursor of death. It has also been suspected that, by some unspecified mechanism, diazepam (and sleeping draughts of all kinds) promote death. A
Theodore Dalrymple
#38. The road to heaven is paved with fulfilled desires, and to hell with frustrated ones.
Theodore Dalrymple
#39. I sometimes astonish my patients by telling them that it is far more important that they should be able to lose themselves than that they should be able to find themselves. For it is only in losing oneself that one does find oneself.
Theodore Dalrymple
#40. He disdains such cowardly acts as looking in wing mirrors or using his indicators. His Ambassador is his chariot, his klaxon his sword. Weaving into the oncoming traffic, playing 'chicken' with the other taxis, Balvinder Singh is a Raja of the Road.
William Dalrymple
#41. I've heard a hundred different variations of instances of unadulterated female victimhood, yet the silence of the feminists is deafening. Where two pieties
feminism and multi-culturalism
come into conflict, the only way of preserving both is an indecent silence.
Theodore Dalrymple
#42. For all its faults we love this city.' Then, after a pause, she added: 'After all, we built it.
William Dalrymple
#43. Custine described them as 'automata inconvenienced with a soul': a description true, perhaps, of all bureaucrats fearful for their jobs but truest of all where power is both arbitrary and completely centralised, as it was in Russia.
Theodore Dalrymple
#44. If the history of the 20th Century proved anything, it proved that however bad things were, human ingenuity could usually find a way to make them worse.
Theodore Dalrymple
#45. Original sin - that is to say, the sin of having been born with human nature that contains within it the temptation to evil - will always make a mockery of attempts at perfection based upon manipulation of the environment.
Theodore Dalrymple
#47. The first requirement of civilisation is that men should be willing to repress their basest instincts and appetites: failure to do which makes them, on account of their intelligence, far worse than mere beasts.
Theodore Dalrymple
#48. In The Gulag Archipelago, for example, Alexander Solzhenitsyn remarks that Shakespeare's evildoers, Macbeth notably among them, stop short at a mere dozen corpses because they have no ideology.
Theodore Dalrymple
#49. Restraints upon our natural inclinations, which left to themselves do not automatically lead us to do what is good for us and often indeed lead us to evil, are not only necessary; they are the indispensable condition of civilized existence.
Theodore Dalrymple
#50. Demonstrative proof is lacking, but if we thought only about those things about which such proof were available, our minds would be empty most of the time.
Theodore Dalrymple
#51. During our first month in the flat, however, Mr Puri was on his best behaviour. Apart from twice proposing marriage to my wife, he behaved with perfect decorum.
William Dalrymple
#52. At its purest, Jainism is almost an atheistic religion, and the much venerated images of the Tirthankaras in temples represent not so much a divine presence as a profound divine absence. I
William Dalrymple
#53. IT IS A MISTAKE to suppose that all men, or at least all Englishmen, want to be free. On the contrary, if freedom entails responsibility, many of them want none of it. They would happily exchange their liberty for a modest (if illusory) security.
Theodore Dalrymple
#54. Finally, at two minutes to three, in the sweltering heat of a Mesopotamian summer afternoon, I crossed the no-man's land into Syria.
William Dalrymple
#55. The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one's whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexities of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved.
Theodore Dalrymple
#56. That civilised life cannot be lived without taboos - that some of them may indeed be justified, and that therefore taboo is not in itself an evil to be vanquished - is a thought too subtle for the aesthetes of nihilism.
Theodore Dalrymple
#57. Mr William, he said, in my life six times have I crashed, and on not one occasion have I ever been killed.( Bevinda Singh taxi driver from City of Djinns
William Dalrymple
#58. I have the not altogether unsatisfying impression that civilisation is collapsing around me.
Is it my age, I wonder, or the age we live in? I am not sure. Civilisations do collapse, after all, but on the other hand people grow old with rather greater frequency.
Theodore Dalrymple
#59. A crude culture makes a coarse people, and private refinement cannot long survive public excess. There is a Gresham's law of culture as well as of money: the bad drives out the good, unless the good is defended.
Theodore Dalrymple
#60. The bravest and most noble are not those who take up arms, but those who are decent despite everything; who improve what it is in their power to improve, but do not imagine themselves to be saviours. In their humble struggle is true heroism.
Theodore Dalrymple
#61. Feeling good about yourself is not the same thing as doing good. Good policy is more important than good feelings.
Theodore Dalrymple
#62. To subdue and crush the masses of a nation by military force, when all are unanimous in the determination to be free, is to attempt the imprisonment of a whole people; all such projects must be temporary and transient, and terminate in a catastrophe...
William Dalrymple
#63. But the ifs of history: if Cleopatra's nose had been one inch longer,' he said, 'would Antony have lost the battle of Actium?
William Dalrymple
#64. And it would be nice if the roof was a bit stronger. Then the peacocks wouldn't keep falling through. I don't mind during the day, but I hate waking up at night to find a peacock in bed with me.
William Dalrymple
#65. He was holding a tray. On the tray were two glasses of milky Indian chai. 'Chota hazari, sahib,' said Ladoo. Bed tea. 'What a nice gesture,' I said returning to Olivia. 'Mrs Puri has sent us up some tea.' 'I wish she had sent it up two hours later,' said Olivia from beneath her sheets.
William Dalrymple
#66. So vast is India, and so uniquely resilient and deeply rooted are her intertwined social and religious institutions, that all foreign intruders are sooner or later either shaken off or absorbed.
William Dalrymple
#67. The water moves on, a little faster than before, yet still the great river flows. It is as fluid and unpredictable in its moods as it has ever been, but it meanders within familiar banks.
William Dalrymple
#68. It is not surprising that emotion untutored by thought results in nearly contentless blather, in which--ironically enough--genuine emotion cannot be adequately expressed.
Theodore Dalrymple
#69. Orders can be benign or malign, but the habit of obeying them can become ingrained.
Theodore Dalrymple
#70. the knowledge, tastes, and social accomplishments of 13-year-olds are often the same as those of 28-year-olds. Adolescents are precociously adult; adults are permanently adolescent.
Theodore Dalrymple
#72. What matters it, O breeze, If now has come the spring When I have lost them both The garden and my nest?
William Dalrymple
#73. One of the characteristics of modern political life is its professionalization, such that it attracts mainly the kind of people with so great an avidity for power and self-importance that they do not mind very much the humiliations of the public exposure to which they are inevitably subjected.
Theodore Dalrymple
#74. In the new Europe, in any case, nationalism is something of an anomaly, given that the drive is to the elimination of national boundaries and national sovereignty.
Theodore Dalrymple
#75. There is nothing an addict likes more, or that serves as better pretext for continuing his present way of life, than to place the weight of responsibility for his situation somewhere other than on his own decisions.
Theodore Dalrymple
#76. The evils of envy and hatred masquerading as humanitarian idealism had darkened his life from its outset, stamping him as a man quick to search for the reality behind the expression of fine sentiments.
Theodore Dalrymple
#77. Political correctness is the means by which we try to control others; decency is the means by which we try to control ourselves.
Theodore Dalrymple
#78. Zafar always put huge emphasis on his role as a protector of the Hindus and the moderator of Muslim demands. He never forgot the central importance of preserving the bond between his Hindu and Muslim subjects, which he always recognised was the central stitching that held his capital city together.
William Dalrymple
#79. We all resort to the ad hominem from time to time: in human affairs, it is difficult to avoid it, and probably not desirable. After all, our opponents are human. The proper use of an ad hominem argument, however, still requires evidence to back it up.
Theodore Dalrymple
#80. A curious reversal in the locus of moral concern has taken place: people feel responsible for everything except for what they do.
Theodore Dalrymple
#81. The idea that man is a tabula rasa, or Mao's sheet of blank paper upon which the most beautiful characters can be written, is an old one with disastrous implications. I do not think though that the cults you mention could survive honest thought about human nature.
Theodore Dalrymple
#82. Equality of Ugliness: If we can't all live in a beautiful place we must all live in an ugly place.
Theodore Dalrymple
#83. The Tughluks have gone; Tughlukabad is a ruin; only Nizamuddin remains.
William Dalrymple
#84. There was that all-pervasive evening scent of cut grass and jasmine.
William Dalrymple
#85. There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy.
Theodore Dalrymple
#86. For me they go hand in hand. When I travel it makes me want to write, when I read it makes me want to travel.
William Dalrymple
#87. WENT ON a long journey by telephone last week. It started with a message in my office on that fiendish modern invention, second in its monstrousness only to the television, the answerphone.
Theodore Dalrymple
#88. Nonjudgmentalism is not really nonjudgmental. It is the judgment that ... everything is the same, nothing is better. This is as barbaric and untruthful a doctrine as has yet emerged from the fertile mind of man.
Theodore Dalrymple
#89. Let us ask whether medicine is winning the war against death. The answer is obviously no, it isn't winning: the one fundamental rule of human existence remains, unfortunately, one man one death.
Theodore Dalrymple
#90. It is only the sentimentalist who imagines that the profundity of a person's response to tragedy is proportional to the length, volume, or shrillness of his lamentation.
Theodore Dalrymple
#91. When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude.
Theodore Dalrymple
#92. Shakespeare knows that the tension between men as they are and men as they ought to be will forever remain unresolved. Man's imperfectability is no more an excuse for total permissiveness, however, than are man's imperfections a reason for inflexible intolerance.
Theodore Dalrymple
#93. Whoever has built a new city in Delhi has always lost it: the Pandava brethren, Prithviraj Chauhan, Feroz Shah Tughluk, Shah Jehan ... They all built new cities and they all lost them. We were no exception.
William Dalrymple
#94. One's past is not one's destiny, and it is self-serving to pretend that it is. If henceforth I were miserable, it would be my own fault: and I vowed never to waste my substance on petty domestic conflict.
Theodore Dalrymple
#95. There is something deeply attractive, at least to quite a lot of people, about squalor, misery, and vice. They are regarded as more authentic, and certainly more exciting, than cleanliness, happiness, and virtue.
Theodore Dalrymple
#96. every psychic defence mechanism known to the modern psychologist makes its appearance somewhere in Shakespeare.
Theodore Dalrymple
#97. I do not think it possible for anyone to get by in life without prejudice. However, the attempt to do so leads many people to suppose that, in order to decide any moral question, they have to find an indubitable first principle from which they can deduce an answer.
Theodore Dalrymple
#99. [T]he scale of a man's evil is not entirely to be measured by its practical consequences. Men commit evil within the scope available to them.
Theodore Dalrymple
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