TJL

“[...] I mean, this was the second half of the twentieth century, for pity's sake, and they still saw communism as the road to utopia. I wonder if any of the people spouting these messages ever really grasped, in later years, the depths of the misery for which they were responsible.”
― Masaji Ishikawa, A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea

“If it happens, God lets it happen, and when we say 'I don't understand,' God replies, 'I don't care.”
― Stephen King, The Green Mile

“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 Cartesian point of moral epistemology: I'm angry, therefore I'm right.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality