17 quotes
Truth is not the first casualty of war alone: it is the first casualty of populism.
The Social Affairs Unit (2006)
It is easy to be lenient at other people's expense, and call it generosity of mind.
The Social Affairs Unit (2006)
The British are fast turning themselves into a nation of slaves, where even the slave-masters are not free.
The Social Affairs Unit (2006)
In a corporate state, all attempts to reduce bureaucracy increase it.
The Social Affairs Unit (2006)
Where tax is solidarity, the national sport is tax evasion.
The Social Affairs Unit (2006)
Modernity is the most transient of qualities.
The Social Affairs Unit (2006)
If a lack of money had prevented people from improving their lot, then mankind would still be living in the caves: unless you believe that investment capital first arrived from outer space.
The Social Affairs Unit (2006)
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.
The Social Affairs Unit (2006)
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.
The Social Affairs Unit (2006)
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.
The Social Affairs Unit (2006)
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.
The Social Affairs Unit (2006)
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.
The Social Affairs Unit (2006)
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.
The Social Affairs Unit (2006)
Loose language suggests loose thought.
The Social Affairs Unit (2006)
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.
The Social Affairs Unit (2006)
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 - it is a consequence of the human condition that we should. But it does nobody any favours to disguise from him the origins of his misfortunes, and pretend that they are all external to him in circumstances in which they are not.
The Social Affairs Unit (2006)
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.
The Social Affairs Unit (2006)