Anthony Daniels Quotes

79 Sourced Quotes

The real and most pressing question raised by any social problem is: How do I appear concerned and compassionate to all my friends, colleagues, and peers?

Anthony Daniels
The attempt to regulate relations between people too closely, by means of the law, in the name of an abstraction such as equality, leads to both absurdity and cruelty.

Anthony Daniels
If consequences are removed from enough actions, then the very concept of human agency evaporates, life itself becomes meaningless, and is thenceforth a vacuum in which people oscillate between boredom and oblivion.

Anthony Daniels
The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose and for someone else to pay when things go wrong.

Anthony Daniels
Life is a biography, not a series of disconnected moments, more or less pleasurable but increasingly tedious and unsatisfying unless one imposes a purposive pattern upon them.

Anthony Daniels
The need always to lie and always to avoid the truth stripped everyone of what Custine called 'the two greatest gifts of God-the soul and the speech which communicates it.' People became hypocritical, cunning, mistrustful, cynical, silent, cruel, and indifferent to the fate of others as a result of the destruction of their own souls.

Anthony Daniels
The loss of the religious understanding of the human condition—that Man is a fallen creature for whom virtue is necessary but never fully attainable—is a loss, not a gain, in true sophistication. The secular substitute—the belief in the perfection of life on earth by the endless extension of a choice of pleasures—is not merely callow by comparison but much less realistic in its understanding of human nature.

Anthony Daniels
For intellectuals, everyone's mind is closed but their own.

Anthony Daniels
Optimism is the parent of despair, while pessimism allows the mind to accustom itself to the inevitable disappointments of human existence by degrees, just as some drugs induce a state of tolerance. Pessimists, moreover, have the better sense of humour, for they have a livelier apprehension of pretension and absurdity. In a meritocracy, furthermore, those who fail must either indulge in elaborate mental contortions to disguise reality from themselves or sink into a deep melancholy.

Anthony Daniels
Equality is the measure of all things, and bad behavior is less bad if everyone indulges in it.

Anthony Daniels
It is curious how an age of public self-revelation, and of the use of psychological jargon, should also be an age when self-examination is rarely practised.

Anthony Daniels
Nationalism is fraught with dangers, of course, but so is the blind refusal to recognize that attachment to one's own culture, traditions, and history is a creative, normal, and healthy part of human experience.

Anthony Daniels
The appeal of political correctness is that it attempts to change men's souls by altering how they speak. If one sufficiently reforms language, certain thoughts become unthinkable, and the world moves in the approved direction.

Anthony Daniels
There is no smoke without fire, and there is no ethically repugnant principle without logic.

Anthony Daniels
When the cold war ended, I thought, as no doubt did many others, that the age of ideology was over. Again like many others, I underestimated man's need for transcendence, which, in the absence of religion or high culture, he is most likely to find in a political or social cause.

Anthony Daniels
It is only by having desire thwarted, and thereby learning to control it—in other words, by becoming civilized—that men become fully human.

Anthony Daniels
Where fashion in clothes, bodily adornment, and music are concerned, it is the underclass that increasingly sets the pace. Never before has there been so much downward cultural aspiration.

Anthony Daniels
The main difference between working in an NHS hospital in Britain and a prison is that prison is much safer.

Anthony Daniels
Blanket compassion will shift the distribution decisively towards the manipulative end of the spectrum, and may paradoxically decrease the compassion with which the genuinely despairing are treated: for they are apt to get lost in the great mass of pseudo-distress and manipulation, and often their conduct draws less attention precisely because it is less attention-seeking.

Anthony Daniels
Mere absurdity has never prevented the triumph of bad ideas, if they accord with easily aroused fantasies of an existence freed of human limitations.

Anthony Daniels
Equality can only be measured by outcome: and this means the imposition of racial quotas. The job of the Senior Executive is therefore to be a senior racist.

Anthony Daniels
It is, of course, a common prejudice that censorship is bad for art and therefore always unjustified: though, if this were so, mankind would have little in the way of an artistic heritage and we should now be living in an artistic golden age.

Anthony Daniels
Henceforth, there is to be no testing oneself against the best, with the possibility, even the likelihood, of failure: instead, one is perpetually to immerse oneself in the tepid bath of self-esteem, mutual congratulation, and benevolence toward all.

Anthony Daniels
Over and over again, medical writers liken withdrawal [from heroin], at worst, to a dose of flu. … Let me ask the reader this: if you were given a choice between suffering a bout of flu in the above sense, or avoiding it by robbing someone in the street or breaking into a house and stealing its contents, which would you choose?

Anthony Daniels
Where hopes are unrealistic, fears often become exaggerated; where dreams alone are blueprints, nightmares result.

Anthony Daniels
What is the point of restraint and circumspection, if such stream-of-consciousness vulgarity can win not merely wealth and fame but complete social acceptance?

Anthony Daniels
Even [Marx], whose information about people came mainly from books, must have known that the Manifesto's depiction of the relations between men and women was grossly distorted. His rage was therefore—as is so much modern rage—entirely synthetic, perhaps an attempt to assume a generosity of spirit, or love of mankind, that he knew he did not have but felt he ought to have

Anthony Daniels
In the modern view, unbridled personal freedom is the only good to be pursued; any obstacle to it is a problem to be overcome.

Anthony Daniels
In Britain, journalists often view comparisons with our society going back two, three, or seven centuries as more relevant than comparisons going back two, three, or seven decades. Drunkenness centuries ago is more illuminating than comparative sobriety 30 years ago. The distant past, selectively mined for evidence that justifies our current conduct, becomes more important than living memory.

Anthony Daniels
There is nothing an addict likes more, or that serves as better pretext for continuing his present way of life, than to place the weight of responsibility for his situation somewhere other than on his own decisions.

Anthony Daniels