Bobby J.

“Comrade” was a word much in vogue under Communism, which tried to foist equality even on friendship by making all men and women equally one’s friend in the forthcoming (it hasn’t quite arrived yet) just society. But in the social sense friendship isn’t about equality. Quite the reverse. By its nature friendship is preferential: one chooses one person over another to draw closer to; an element of exclusivity is implied in the word “friend.”
― Joseph Epstein, Friendship: An Expose

“If equality were a desirable goal in itself, however, it would be a matter of indifference whether equality of life expectancy were achieved by causing the poor to live longer or the rich to die sooner. Of course, hatred of the rich is a much stronger emotion than love of the poor: no rampaging mobs ever went through a city seeking out the poor to whom they could give away their possessions. But whatever bitterness or resentment he might hide in his heart, no respectable public health doctor has ever sought to promote the death of the rich as a way to achieve equality in life expectancy. The way forward is to bring the poor up to the standards of the rich, even if in practice this means expropriating the rich by means of taxation.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, In Praise of Prejudice: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past

“Self-esteem is a concept that belongs to the psychology of the Real Me. The Real Me, of course, is someone who is inherently good and admirable: Man being by nature good, inside every bad man there’s a good one trying to get out, obstructed, alas, by such phenomena as low self-esteem.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

“surely no society in the world can have existed in which there was not much justly to criticise. But critics of social institutions and traditions, including writers of imaginative literature, should always be aware that civilisation needs conservation at least as much as it needs change, and that immoderate criticism, or criticism from the standpoint of utopian first principles, is capable of doing much – indeed devastating – harm. No man is so brilliant that he can work out everything for himself, so that the wisdom of ages has nothing useful to tell him. To imagine otherwise is to indulge in the most egotistical of hubris.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left Of It