A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.
Affectation, when practiced long enough, becomes character.
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.
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.
Civilization is the sum total of all those activities that allow men to transcend mere biological existence and reach for a richer mental, aesthetic, material, and spiritual life.
Culture is as much a matter of character as of education, and it is precisely character that our leaders lack.
Equality is the measure of all things, and bad behavior is less bad if everyone indulges in it.
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.
For intellectuals, everyone's mind is closed but their own.
For the sake of democracy, vigorous, civilized debate must replace the law of silence that political correctness has imposed.
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.
Henceforth, virtue was not the exercise of discipline, self-control or benevolence for the sake of others, but the expression of the right opinions of the moment.
His greatest fear, or nightmare, is not to be thought hip or cool, and if to avoid that terrible fate it means that he has to glamorize evil- well, so be it.
I have never understood the liberal assumption that if there were justice in the world, there would be fewer rather than more prisoners.
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.
If we can sympathise only with the utterly blameless, then we can sympathise with no one, for all of us have contributed to our own misfortunes.
In a corporate state, all attempts to reduce bureaucracy increase it.
In a democratic age, only the behavior of the authorities is subject to public criticism; that of the people themselves, never.
In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.
In the modern view, unbridled personal freedom is the only good to be pursued; any obstacle to it is a problem to be overcome.
It is better to be opposed by an enemy than to be adrift in meaninglessness, for the simulacrum of an enemy lends purpose to actions whose nihilism would otherwise be self-evident.
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.
It is hard to oppose an ideology with a tradition.
It is only by having desire thwarted, and thereby learning to control it- in other words, by becoming civilized- that men become fully human.
It is strange, is it not, how the more strenuously we deny the importance of race in human affairs, the more obsessed with it and the touchier on the subject we grow.
It is the inescapable duty of every decent citizen to express no interest in or enthusiasm for football and the World Cup.
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.
Loose language suggests loose thought.
Mediocrity triumphs because it presents itself as democratic and because it is dull, and so for many does not seem worth struggling against.
Mere absurdity has never prevented the triumph of bad ideas, if they accord with easily aroused fantasies of an existence freed of human limitations.
Modernity is the most transient of qualities.
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.
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... have the better sense of humor, 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.
Political abstractions can disguise or change the meaning of the most elementary realities.
Political correctness is the means by which we try to control others; decency is the means by which we try to control ourselves.
Reason can never be the absolute dictator of man's mental or moral economy.
Resentment is one of the few emotions that never lets you down, but it's useless. In fact, it's worse than useless, it's harmful, and we all suffer from it at some time in our lives.
Tell me upon whose grave you dance and I will tell you what your opinions are.
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.
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.
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.
The primary function of management is to create the chaos that only management can sort out.
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.
The tattoo has a profound meaning: the superficiality of modern man's existence.
The victory over cruelty is never final, but, like the maintenance of freedom, requires eternal vigilance.
There is no one as paranoid as an unpublished poet.
There is no smoke without fire, and there is no ethically repugnant principle without logic.
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.
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.
There is nothing an official hates more than a person who makes up his own mind.
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.
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.
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.
Truth is not the first casualty of war alone: it is the first casualty of populism.
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.
We are like creatures so dazzled with our own technological prowess that we no longer think it necessary to consider the obvious.
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?
What youth considers liberation, maturity considers tasteless excess.
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.
When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude.
When 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.
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.
Where hopes are unrealistic, fears often become exaggerated; where dreams alone are blueprints, nightmares result.
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).
Wisdom and good governance require more than the consistent application of abstract principles.
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