Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist) quotes - page 3

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. (Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist))
Where fashion in clothes, bodily adornment, and music are concerned, it is the underclass that increasingly sets the pace. Never before has there been so much downward cultural aspiration. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
Multiculturalism as an official doctrine, complete with enforcing bureaucracies, undermines the rule of law because it seeks to divide people, formalise their cultural differences and enclose them in moral and intellectual ghettoes. As a result, as Bhiku Parekh puts it, ‘The idea of national culture makes little sense.' But the rule of law requires a common cultural understanding, not merely the means of repression to enforce a legal code. Once that basic cultural understanding is lost, all that remains is repression, effective or ineffective as the case may be, and experienced by many as alien and unjust. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
Compassionate fellow-feeling ... can soon become self-indulgent and lead to spiritual pride. It imparts an inner glow, like a shot of whiskey on a cold day, but like whisky it can prevent the clear-headedness which we need at least as much as we need warmth of heart. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
Education is not a shield against stupidity, much less against brutality. Indeed, one might almost define an intellectual as someone who can witness a massacre and see a principle. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
Henceforth there are to be no fixed or inviolable principles of law at all-only an endlessly changing legal response to the fashionable causes of the moment. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
I have never understood the liberal assumption that if there were justice in the world, there would be fewer rather than more prisoners. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
Mere absurdity has never prevented the triumph of bad ideas, if they accord with easily aroused fantasies of an existence freed of human limitations. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
Having been issued the false prospectus of happiness through unlimited sex, modern man concludes, when he is not happy with his life, that his sex has not been unlimited enough. If welfare does not eliminate squalor, we need more welfare; if sex does not bring happiness, we need more sex. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
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. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
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. (Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist))
Even [Marx], whose information about people came mainly from books, must have known that the Manifesto's depiction of the relations between men and women was grossly distorted. His rage was therefore-as is so much modern rage-entirely synthetic, perhaps an attempt to assume a generosity of spirit, or love of mankind, that he knew he did not have but felt he ought to have. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
Where hopes are unrealistic, fears often become exaggerated; where dreams alone are blueprints, nightmares result. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
I was in the enormous and almost deserted square in front of the Great People's Study House-all open spaces in Pyongyang remain deserted unless filled with parades of hundreds of thousands of human automata-when a young Korean slid surreptitiously up to me and asked, "Do you speak English?" An electric moment: for in North Korea, unsupervised contact between a Korean and a foreigner is utterly unthinkable, as unthinkable as shouting, "Down with Big Brother!" "Yes," I replied. "I am a student at the Foreign Languages Institute. Reading Dickens and Shakespeare is the greatest, the only pleasure of my life." It was the most searing communication I have ever received in my life. We parted immediately afterward and of course will never meet again. For him, Dickens and Shakespeare (which the regime permitted him to read with quite other ends in view) guaranteed the possibility not just of freedom but of truly human life itself. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
Civilization is the sum total of all those activities that allow men to transcend mere biological existence and reach for a richer mental, aesthetic, material, and spiritual life. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
Equality is the measure of all things, and bad behavior is less bad if everyone indulges in it. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
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. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
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. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
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?”. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
Political abstractions can disguise or change the meaning of the most elementary realities. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
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. (Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist))
For intellectuals, everyone's mind is closed but their own. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
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. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
The nearer emotional life approaches to hysteria, to continual outward show, the less genuine it becomes. Feeling becomes equated with vehemence of expression, so that insincerity becomes permanent. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
If all our political and intellectual elite offers by way of a national culture is "pop music, gambling, fashionable clothes or television,” then we can neither mount a convincing intellectual defense against our enemies, nor hope to integrate intelligent, inquiring, and unfulfilled Muslim youths-young men principally, of course-to our way of life. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)