In claiming that prohibition, not the drugs themselves, is the problem, Nadelmann and many others - even policemen - have said that "the war on drugs is lost." But to demand a yes or no answer to the question "Is the war against drugs being won?" is like demanding a yes or no answer to the question "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" Never can an unimaginative and fundamentally stupid metaphor have exerted a more baleful effect upon proper thought.
Theodore DalrympleWhere a reputation for intolerance is more feared than a reputation for vice itself, all manner of evil may be expected to flourish.
Theodore DalrympleWhen people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.
Theodore DalrympleI'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 DalrympleThe loss of the religious understanding of the human conditionโthat Man is a fallen creature for whom virtue is necessary but never fully attainableโis a loss, not a gain, in true sophistication. The secular substituteโthe belief in the perfection of life on earth by the endless extension of a choice of pleasuresโis not merely callow by comparison but much less realistic in its understanding of human nature.
Theodore Dalrymple