Douglas Murray > Quotes

“Disagreement is not oppression. Argument is not assault. Words – even provocative or repugnant ones – are not violence. The answer to speech we do not like is more speech.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“If somebody has the competency to do something, and the desire to do something, then nothing about their race, sex or sexual orientation should hold them back. But minimizing difference is not the same as pretending difference does not exist. To assume that sex, sexuality and skin colour mean nothing would be ridiculous. But to assume that they mean everything will be fatal.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“When it comes to anti-fascism in most of Western Europe, there would appear for now to be a supply-and-demand problem: the demand for fascists vastly outstrips the actual supply.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“To immerse oneself in popular culture for any length of time is to wallow in an almost unbearable shallowness. Was the sum of European endeavour and achievement really meant to culminate in this?”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“The claim that Islam is a religion of peace is a nicety invented by Western politicians so as either not to offend their Muslim populations or simply lie to themselves that everything might yet turn out fine. In fact, since its beginning Islam has been pretty violent. ”
― Douglas Murray, Islamophilia

“In such a view of society, however greatly you might wish to benefit from an endless supply of cheap labour, a wider range of cuisine or the salving of a generation’s conscience, you still would not have a right to wholly transform your society. Because that which you inherited that is good should also be passed on. Even were you to decide that some of the views or lifestyles of your ancestors could be improved upon, it does not follow that you should hand over to the next generation a society that is chaotic, fractured and unrecognisable.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“[They] may have for instance taken the view of Edmund Burke, who in the 18th century made the central conservative insight; that a culture and a society are not things run for the convenience of the people who happen to be here right now, but is a deep pact between the dead, the living, and those yet to be born.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“A country that believes it has never done any wrong is a country that could do wrong at any time. But a country that believes it has only done wrong, or done such a terrible, unalleviated amount of wrong in the past, is likely to become a country that is inclined to doubt its ability to ever do any good in the future.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“Those who believe Europe is for the world have never explained why this process should be one way: why Europeans going anywhere else in the world is colonialism whereas the rest of the world coming to Europe is just and fair.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“As one of the consequences of the death of God, Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw that people could find themselves stuck in cycles of Christian theology with no way out. Specifically that people would inherit the concepts of guilt, sin and shame but would be without the means of redemption which the Christian religion also offered. Today we do seem to live in a world where actions can have consequences we could never have imagined, where guilt and shame are more at hand than ever, and where we have no means whatsoever of redemption.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“Europeans have been deflating the language of anti-fascism ahead of a time when they might need it.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“The same uneven application of values applies in the weird worlds of academia and the think tanks. Like the media, they choose to close off their minds the moment that the question of Islam comes along. Most bizarre is that you can get away with saying anything, absolutely anything, so long as it is flattering of Islam. It doesn’t matter how soppy, how sentimental, how completely unacademic it is: so long as it’s about Islam, different standards apply.”
― Douglas Murray, Islamophilia

“If two people are in disagreement about something important, they may disagree as amicably as they like if it is just a matter of getting to the truth or the most amenable option. But if one party finds their whole purpose in life to reside in some aspect of that disagreement, then the chances of amicability fade fast and the likelihood of reaching any truth recedes.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“From Michel Foucault these thinkers absorbed their idea of society not as an infinitely complex system of trust and traditions that have evolved over time, but always in the unforgiving light cast when everything is viewed solely through the prism of ‘power’. Viewing all human interactions in this light distorts, rather than clarifies, presenting a dishonest interpretation of our lives. Of course power exists as a force in the world, but so do charity, forgiveness and love. If you were to ask most people what matters in their lives very few would say ‘power’. Not because they haven’t absorbed their Foucault, but because it is perverse to see everything in life through such a monomaniacal lens.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“There is a gigantic modern fallacy at work here. For of course people only think that they would have acted better in history because they know how history ended up. People in history didn’t – and don’t – have that luxury. They made good or bad choices in the times and places they were in, given the situations and shibboleths that they found themselves with.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“Only Europeans and their descendants remember guilt. So only Europeans and their descendants have continuously to atone for it.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“To immerse oneself in popular culture for any length of time is to wallow in an almost unbearable shallowness.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“Trans campaigners intent on arguing that trans is hardware can only win their argument if they persuade people that being a woman is a matter of software. And not all feminists are willing to concede that one.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“For Nietzsche, one of the dangers of the men of ressentiment is that they will achieve their ultimate form of revenge, which is to turn happy people into unhappy people like themselves—to shove their misery into the faces of the happy so that in due course the happy “start to be ashamed of their happiness and perhaps say to one another: ‘It’s a disgrace to be happy!”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“public life is now dense with people desperate to man the barricades long after the revolution is over. Either because they mistake the barricades for home, or because they have no other home to go to. In each case a demonstration of virtue demands an overstating of the problem, which then causes an amplification of the problem.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“For the Church of Sweden, the Church of England, the German Lutheran Church and many other branches of European Christianity, the message of the religion has become a form of left-wing politics, diversity action and social welfare projects.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“To her audience in Boston she also explained how white people who see people as individuals rather than by their skin colour are in fact ‘dangerous’.70 Meaning that it took only half a century for Martin Luther King’s vision to be exactly inverted.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“Prose this bad can only occur when the author is trying to hide something. A theoretical physicist like Sheldon Lee Glashow cannot afford to write in the unreadable prose of the social sciences. He needs to communicate exceptionally complex truths in as simple and clear a language as possible.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“Islamophilia’. And it has gripped the Western world. It could be defined as the expression of disproportionate adoration of Islam. I don’t say – because I don’t think – that Islam has no redeeming features or that the religion has achieved nothing. But it seems strange to me that so many people today can be quite so asinine and supine when it comes to the religion. No other religion in the world today receives the kind of pass that Islam gets. Most religions currently get a hell of a time. But Islam does not. And people express their resulting feeling for it for a number of reasons. First, there are those who just think Islam is wonderful. This encompasses a huge range of people. For instance, some of them can be on the left/liberal side of the political divide while others can be right-wing conservatives.”
― Douglas Murray, Islamophilia

“For present-day politicians there are only political points to be made from such statements, and the larger the sin the larger the outrage, the larger the apology and the larger the potential political gain for sorrow expressed. Through such statements political leaders can gain the benefits of magnanimity without the stain of involvement: the person making the apology had done nothing wrong and all the people who could have received the apology are dead.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“If the burden of working for little reward in an isolating society stripped of any overriding purpose can be recognised to have an effect on individuals, how could it not also be said to have an effect on society as a whole? Or to put it the other way around, if enough people in a society are suffering from a form of exhaustion, might it not be that the society they are living in has become exhausted?”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“After all, in the sporting world, being discovered to have taken testosterone is ordinarily grounds to prevent someone from competing – unless, it turns out, the person is taking testosterone to transition to the opposite sex. In which case sensitivity overrides science.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“you are only a member of a recognized minority group so long as you accept the specific grievances, political grievances and resulting electoral platforms that other people have worked out for you. Step outside of these lines and you are not a person with the same characteristics you had before but who happens to think differently from some prescribed norm. You have the characteristics taken away from you.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“And so all the time the European brain has held onto two contradictory things. The first is the dominant established narrative of a generation: that anyone in the world can come to Europe and become a European, and that in order to become a European you merely need to be a person in Europe. The other part of the European brain has spent these years watching and waiting. This part could always recognise that the new arrivals were not only coming in unprecedented numbers but were bringing with them customs that, if not all unprecedented, had certainly not existed in Europe for a long time. The first part of the brain insists that the newcomers will assimilate and that, given time, even the most hard-to-swallow aspects of the culture of the new arrivals will become more recognisably European. Optimism favours the first part of the brain. Events favour the second, which increasingly begins to wonder whether anyone has the time for the changes that are meant to happen.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“T. S. Eliot memorably described it, an effort at ‘dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good’.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam