Anthony Daniels Quotes

79 Sourced Quotes

It is easy to be lenient at other people's expense, and call it generosity of mind.

Anthony Daniels
Mediocrity triumphs because it presents itself as democratic and because it is dull, and so for many does not seem worth struggling against.

Anthony Daniels
Frivolity without gaiety and earnestness without seriousness—a most unattractive combination.

Anthony Daniels
When a population feels alienated from the legal system under which it lives, because that system fails to protect it from real dangers while lending succor and encouragement to every possible kind of wrongdoing, the population may well lose faith in the very idea of law. That is how civilization unravels.

Anthony Daniels
Whereas fortitude was once regarded as a virtue, it has come to be regarded as a kind of reprehensible and deliberate obtuseness, to be utterly condemned as treason to the self (there is no fury like a non-judgmentalist scorned).

Anthony Daniels
Nonjudgmentalism is not really nonjudgmental. It is the judgment that... everything is the same, nothing is better. This is as barbaric and untruthful a doctrine as has yet emerged from the fertile mind of man.

Anthony Daniels
Wisdom and good governance require more than the consistent application of abstract principles.

Anthony Daniels
For the sake of democracy, vigorous, civilized debate must replace the law of silence that political correctness has imposed.

Anthony Daniels
Never has so much indifference masqueraded as so much compassion; never has there been such willful blindness. The once pragmatic English have become a nation of sleepwalkers.

Anthony Daniels
Where a reputation for intolerance is more feared than a reputation for vice itself, all manner of evil may be expected to flourish.

Anthony Daniels
To make up for its lack of a moral compass, the British public is prey to sudden gusts of kitschy sentimentality followed by vehement outrage, encouraged by the cheap and cynical sensationalism of its press. Spasms of self-righteousness are its substitute for the moral life.

Anthony Daniels
In a corporate state, all attempts to reduce bureaucracy increase it.

Anthony Daniels
Children in school are not students, they are pupils. It is typical of certain kinds of politicians that they should regard children as adults, the better subsequently, and consequently, to regard adults as children.

Anthony Daniels
I was in the enormous and almost deserted square in front of the Great People's Study House—all open spaces in Pyongyang remain deserted unless filled with parades of hundreds of thousands of human automata—when a young Korean slid surreptitiously up to me and asked, "Do you speak English?"
An electric moment: for in North Korea, unsupervised contact between a Korean and a foreigner is utterly unthinkable, as unthinkable as shouting, "Down with Big Brother!"
"Yes," I replied.
"I am a student at the Foreign Languages Institute. Reading Dickens and Shakespeare is the greatest, the only pleasure of my life."
It was the most searing communication I have ever received in my life.

Anthony Daniels
In a democratic age, only the behavior of the authorities is subject to public criticism; that of the people themselves, never.

Anthony Daniels
The intellectual's struggle to deny the obvious is never more desperate than when reality is unpleasant and at variance with his preconceptions and when full acknowledgment of it would undermine the foundations of his intellectual worldview.

Anthony Daniels
Unilateral tolerance in a world of intolerance is like unilateral disarmament in a world of armed camps: it regards hope as a better basis for policy than reality.

Anthony Daniels
In the British public service nothing succeeds like failure: indeed, failure is success, if looked on in the right way, namely as something requiring yet further intervention in people's lives to amend.

Anthony Daniels
Henceforth there are to be no fixed or inviolable principles of law at all—only an endlessly changing legal response to the fashionable causes of the moment.

Anthony Daniels
To deal with the problems of modern society, hard thought, confrontation with an often unpleasant reality, and moral courage are needed, for which a vague and self-congratulatory broadmindedness is no substitute.

Anthony Daniels
Where tax is solidarity, the national sport is tax evasion.

Anthony Daniels
The refusal of free inquiry derives from an awareness of the fragility of the basis of religious faith; and since certainty is psychologically preferable to truth, the former often being willfully mistaken for the latter, anything that threatens certainty is anathematized with fury.

Anthony Daniels
The tattoo has a profound meaning: the superficiality of modern man's existence.

Anthony Daniels
If all our political and intellectual elite offers by way of a national culture is pop music, gambling, fashionable clothes or television, then we can neither mount a convincing intellectual defense against our enemies, nor hope to integrate intelligent, inquiring, and unfulfilled Muslim youths—young men principally, of course—to our way of life.

Anthony Daniels
Experience rarely teaches its lessons directly but instead requires interpretation through the filter of preconceived theories, prejudices, and desires. Where these are invincible, facts are weak things.

Anthony Daniels
It seems that when an impending catastrophe will affect them personally, in their very flesh and blood, intellectuals start to think more clearly about the legal and institutional prerequisites of a free society.

Anthony Daniels
The nearer emotional life approaches to hysteria, to continual outward show, the less genuine it becomes. Feeling becomes equated with vehemence of expression, so that insincerity becomes permanent.

Anthony Daniels
It is hard to oppose an ideology with a tradition.

Anthony Daniels
There is no such thing, wrote Oscar Wilde, as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. Presumably, then, Mein Kampf would have been all right had it been better written.

Anthony Daniels
There is something deeply attractive, at least to quite a lot of people, about squalor, misery, and vice. They are regarded as more authentic, and certainly more exciting, than cleanliness, happiness, and virtue.

Anthony Daniels