When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude.
To regret religion is to regret Western civilization.
Feeling good about yourself is not the same thing as doing good. Good policy is more important than good feelings.
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.
The purpose of those who argue for cultural diversity is to impose ideological uniformity.
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.
Experience rarely teaches its lessons directly but instead requires interpretation through the filter of preconceived theories, prejudices, and desires. Where these are invincible, facts are weak things.
The victory over cruelty is never final, but, like the maintenance of freedom, requires eternal vigilance.
In Britain, journalists often view comparisons with our society going back two, three, or seven centuries as more relevant than comparisons going back two, three, or seven decades. Drunkenness centuries ago is more illuminating than comparative sobriety 30 years ago. The distant past, selectively mined for evidence that justifies our current conduct, becomes more important than living memory.
Henceforth, there is to be no testing oneself against the best, with the possibility, even the likelihood, of failure: instead, one is perpetually to immerse oneself in the tepid bath of self-esteem, mutual congratulation, and benevolence toward all.
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.
The real and most pressing question raised by any social problem is: How do I appear concerned and compassionate to all my friends, colleagues, and peers?”
Nationalism is fraught with dangers, of course, but so is the blind refusal to recognize that attachment to one’s own culture, traditions, and history is a creative, normal, and healthy part of human experience.
Where tax is solidarity, the national sport is tax evasion.
I have never understood the liberal assumption that if there were justice in the world, there would be fewer rather than more prisoners.
Frivolity without gaiety and earnestness without seriousness—a most unattractive combination.
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.
The intellectual's struggle to deny the obvious is never more desperate than when reality is unpleasant and at variance with his preconceptions and when full acknowledgment of it would undermine the foundations of his intellectual worldview.
Mediocrity triumphs because it presents itself as democratic and because it is dull, and so for many does not seem worth struggling against.
It is hard to oppose an ideology with a tradition.
