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

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.

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 that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

To regret religion is to regret Western civilization.

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.

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.