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

To regret religion is to regret Western civilization.

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.

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.

There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy.

A curious reversal in the locus of moral concern has taken place: people feel responsible for everything except for what they do.

When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude.

Orders can be benign or malign, but the habit of obeying them can become ingrained.

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.

Equality of Ugliness: If we can't all live in a beautiful place we must all live in an ugly place.

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.

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.

Do I grow cleverer with age, or does the world grow more stupid?

Obesity is the result of a loss of self-control. Indeed, loss of self-control might be said to be the defining social (or anti-social) characteristic of our age: public drunkenness, excessive gambling, promiscuity and common-or-garden rudeness are all examples of our collective loss of self-control.

If the history of the 20th Century proved anything, it proved that however bad things were, human ingenuity could usually find a way to make them worse.