Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist) quotes - page 4

We are like creatures so dazzled with our own technological prowess that we no longer think it necessary to consider the obvious. (Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist))
The appeal of political correctness is that it attempts to change men's souls by altering how they speak. If one sufficiently reforms language, certain thoughts become unthinkable, and the world moves in the approved direction. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
Reason can never be the absolute dictator of man's mental or moral economy. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
The tattoo has a profound meaning: the superficiality of modern man's existence. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
There is no smoke without fire, and there is no ethically repugnant principle without logic. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
To deal with the problems of modern society, hard thought, confrontation with an often unpleasant reality, and moral courage are needed, for which a vague and self-congratulatory broadmindedness is no substitute. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
Whereas fortitude was once regarded as a virtue, it has come to be regarded as a kind of reprehensible and deliberate obtuseness, to be utterly condemned as treason to the self (there is no fury like a non-judgmentalist scorned). View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
It is curious how an age of public self-revelation, and of the use of psychological jargon, should also be an age when self-examination is rarely practised. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
Loose language suggests loose thought. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
Children in school are not students, they are pupils. It is typical of certain kinds of politicians that they should regard children as adults, the better subsequently, and consequently, to regard adults as children. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
In the British public service nothing succeeds like failure: indeed, failure is success, if looked on in the right way, namely as something requiring yet further intervention in people's lives to amend. (Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist))
Equality can only be measured by outcome: and this means the imposition of racial quotas. The job of the Senior Executive is therefore to be a senior racist. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
Henceforth, virtue was not the exercise of discipline, self-control or benevolence for the sake of others, but the expression of the right opinions of the moment. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
It is strange, is it not, how the more strenuously we deny the importance of race in human affairs, the more obsessed with it and the touchier on the subject we grow. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
The attempt to regulate relations between people too closely, by means of the law, in the name of an abstraction such as equality, leads to both absurdity and cruelty. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
It is easy to be lenient at other people's expense, and call it generosity of mind. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
Blanket compassion will shift the distribution decisively towards the manipulative end of the spectrum, and may paradoxically decrease the compassion with which the genuinely despairing are treated: for they are apt to get lost in the great mass of pseudo-distress and manipulation, and often their conduct draws less attention precisely because it is less attention-seeking. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
The main difference between working in an NHS hospital in Britain and a prison is that prison is much safer. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
Over and over again, medical writers liken withdrawal [from heroin], at worst, to a dose of flu. ... Let me ask the reader this: if you were given a choice between suffering a bout of flu in the above sense, or avoiding it by robbing someone in the street or breaking into a house and stealing its contents, which would you choose? View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
His greatest fear, or nightmare, is not to be thought hip or cool, and if to avoid that terrible fate it means that he has to glamorize evil--well, so be it. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
If consequences are removed from enough actions, then the very concept of human agency evaporates, life itself becomes meaningless, and is thenceforth a vacuum in which people oscillate between boredom and oblivion. (Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist))
Wisdom and good governance require more than the consistent application of abstract principles. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
And the fact is that millions of opiates addicts having given up their habit without medical assistance. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
Addicts, to this day, claim that they are they are the only people qualified to speak of the seriousness of withdrawal effects; as if only people with cerebral malaria or bowel cancer could speak of their seriousness. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
I'm not actually against, for example, people going into rehabilitation, provided it is understood that this is not really a medical procedure. Often what happens is that people who are addicted to a substance - alcohol or opiates - have comprehensively messed up their lives, and since life is biography and not just a series of unconnected moments, it may be that they require some assistance in getting their lives together. But I don't regard that as really a medical procedure. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)