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.
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.
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.
Cruelty is like hope: it springs eternal.
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 British are fast turning themselves into a nation of slaves, where even the slave-masters are not free.
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.
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.
Modernity is the most transient of qualities.
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.
It is hard to oppose an ideology with a tradition.
Don't call me a mindless philosopher, you overweight glob of grease.
I don't do that many appearances at conventions. I like to keep them special for me. And for the fans, I hope.
On a film set everyone is very cool. Well, blase really.
We have people being a little uncomfortable in their life on Earth with finances and so on, so Science Fantasy or Science Fiction allows people to think that there are possibilities beyond the gravity of our planet.
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.
In the modern view, unbridled personal freedom is the only good to be pursued; any obstacle to it is a problem to be overcome.
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.
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.
In Britain, journalists often view comparisons with our society going back two, three, or seven centuries as more relevant than comparisons going back two, three, or seven decades. Drunkenness centuries ago is more illuminating than comparative sobriety 30 years ago. The distant past, selectively mined for evidence that justifies our current conduct, becomes more important than living memory.
We are like creatures so dazzled with our own technological prowess that we no longer think it necessary to consider the obvious.
Mediocrity triumphs because it presents itself as democratic and because it is dull, and so for many does not seem worth struggling against.
You know, a lot of people are loath to go to an orchestral concert because they are intimidated by the thought.
