When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude.
Theodore DalrympleThere is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy.
Theodore DalrympleChildhood in large parts of modern Britain, at any rate, has been replaced by premature adulthood, or rather adolescence. Children grow up very fast but not very far. That is why it is possible for 14 year olds now to establish friendships with 26 year olds - because they know by the age of 14 all they are ever going to know.
Theodore DalrympleThe idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one's whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexities of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved.
Theodore Dalrymple