Николай Алексиев > Николай's Quotes

“How can one respect people as members of the human race unless one holds them to a standard of conduct and truthfulness?”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Not With a Bang But a Whimper: The Politics & Culture of Decline

“Yet literal-mindedness is not honesty or fidelity to truth--far from it. For it is the whole experience of mankind that sexual life is always, and must always be, hidden by veils of varying degrees of opacity, if it is to be humanized into something beyond a mere animal function. What is inherently secretive, that is to say self-conscious and human, cannot be spoken of directly; the attempt leads only to crudity, not to truth.”
― Theodore Dalrymple

“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, Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses

“No one seems to have noticed that a loss of a sense of shame means a loss of privacy; a loss of privacy means a loss of intimacy; and a loss of intimacy means a loss of depth. There is, in fact, no better way to produce shallow and superficial people than to let them live their lives entirely in the open, without concealment of anything.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses

“The consumption of drugs has the effect of reducing men's freedom by circumscribing the range of their interests. It impairs their ability to pursue more important human aims, such as raising a family and fulfilling civic obligations. Very often it impairs their ability to pursue gainful employment and promotes parasitism. Moreover, far from being expanders of consciousness, most drugs severely limit it. One of the most striking characteristics of drug-takers is their intense and tedious self-absorption.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses

“The worth of a cause is not necessarily proportional to the lengths to which people will go to promote it.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World

“There can be no greater pleasure in life,” Stalin is reputed to have said, “than to choose one’s enemy, inflict a terrible revenge on him, and go quietly to bed.” He might have added, if he really did say this, “secure in the knowledge that one has done good.” Committing evil for goodness’ sake must surely rank as an even greater pleasure than Stalin’s: It satisfies the inner sadist and the inner moralist at the same time.”
― Theodore Dalrymple

“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

“Violence is not confidence, and terror is not mastery.”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

“A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.”
― Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

[Inaugural Address, January 20 1961]”
― John F. Kennedy

“A Home without Equity Is Just a Rental with Debt,”
― Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

“Charlie and Jamie had always sort of assumed that there was some grown-up in charge of the financial system whom they had never met; now, they saw there was not.”
― Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

“The upper classes of this country raped this country. You fucked people. You built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience. Nobody”
― Michael Lewis, The Big Short

“Philosophy as such is nothing but genuine awareness of the problems, i.e., of the fundamental and comprehensive problems. It is impossible to think about these problems without becoming inclined toward a solution, toward one or the other of the very few typical solutions. Yet as long as there is no wisdom but only quest for wisdom, the evidence of all solutions is necessarily smaller than the evidence of the problems. Therefore the philosopher ceases to be a philosopher at the moment at which the 'subjective certainty' [quoting M. Alexandre Kojève] of a solution becomes stronger than his awareness of the problematic character of that solution. At that moment the sectarian is born. The danger of succumbing to the attraction of solutions is essential to philosophy which, without incurring this danger, would degenerate into playing with the problems. But the philosopher does not necessarily succumb to this danger, as is shown by Socrates, who never belonged to a sect and never founded one. And even if the philosophic friends are compelled to be members of a sect or to found one, they are not necessarily members of one and the same sect: Amicus Plato.”
― Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy?

“The moral ascendancy of equality has made it difficult to use concepts such as virtue, excellence, beauty and – above all – truth.”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”
― Carl Schmitt

“All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development - in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent god became the omnipotent lawgiver - but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries.”
― Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty