Insightful quotations and aphorisms

[Charlie]

Liberalism is nothing but trying to fit in with the cool kids.

[Nathan]

An interesting George Orwell one I'd never heard of:

The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.

[Gavin]

Some interesting observations have been made on this forum about the typical attitude of women in the workplace (overly rule-following, socialising and dramatising issues which do not require such treatment, emphasising political correctness and so on). Women are (sadly) typically left-wing in politics. I thought of these observations as I just read the following words by Orwell in Nineteen-Eighty-Four:

"It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers."

[Nathan]

Billy Connolly on feminism:

It's called a manhole cover and I will call it a personhole cover when I discover a woman with an overwhelming desire to climb down one.

[Gavin]

"According to Islam, Muhammad is the perfect man whose life must be imitated. The consequences are horrendous and can be witnessed on a daily basis."

[Charlie]

In the wake of the news in Rotherham, this brilliant quote comes to mind:

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. 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. 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. 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. 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.

[Charlie]

We live in a time when we are told we always need an enemy, that there are people who are out to come and get you. 'Beware the dreadlocked lesbians from Albania,' if you will.

Magnificent.

[Andrea]

Brilliant quote.

[Jonathan]

Here's one of Dalrymple's from a recent article:

A lot of conversation is monologue posing as dialogue. There is a tacit agreement that I will let you bore me with details of your uninteresting life provided that you will let me express my interesting, not to say immortal, reflections upon my own fascinating and unprecedented condition. What others say is a regrettable interlude in my message to the world.

From an article on takimag:
http://takimag.com/article/a_sense_of_o ... z3GfTs7f1a[/

[Charlie]

And here's another Dalrymple quote - this one comes from Taki's mag, too:

For monomaniacs, their one thing is the meaning of their existence. So while they can devote their miserable lives to the persecution of those who think differently from them on that one, only moderately important subject, the persecuted do not care enough about that subject to risk much discomfort in order to expound what they see as the truth about it.

[Gavin]

“If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man... just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he's a good man.”

- Dostoyevsky

The same applies to women, of course. In my experience one rarely hears a pleasant and good natured laugh these days - they're usually sneering, cynical, sarcastic or an outright cackle instead.

[Nathan]

Will I be accused of approving these facts on the pretext that I describe them?

- Stendhal

The first law [of the Dictatorship of the Good Cause] consists of denial of facts and conclusions if they are inconvenient to the liberals and their supporters. To infringe this law attracts an immediate punishment. Not a physical punishment, because this dictatorship fortunately does not possess a physical power, but a social and psychological punishment that consists of ostracism, calumnies and distortion of what you have said.

- R.G. Waldeck (writing in 1939)

Both come to me via the Dalrymple article currently linked to in the Twitter feed:

http://www.libertylawsite.org/2015/01/0 ... d-crudity/

I've found the original article which the Waldeck quote was taken from. It's about American left-wing circles' initial unwillingness to accept that Hitler was a threat. Not only does it provide an uncanny parallel to Islam apologists today but provides a few more insightful truths. Just one more:

They [liberals] work on the premise of what should not be cannot be. The less men and events match their ideals, the less reliable their judgement of these men and events tend to become.

http://www.unz.org/Pub/AmMercury-1939oct-00205

[Jonathan]

I also followed the link to that article (the twitter feed is so convenient!). I've just purchased the Waldeck book... should be here in a couple of weeks.

[Charlie]

You may well have seen this on Ed West's Twitter feed recently, but I think that it's pithy/aphoristic enough to go here:

I consider left-liberalism the political equivalent of obesity/type-2 diabetes. [It's a] product of our success & better than previous ailments.

It certainly made me chuckle!

[Charlie]

Here's one from Steve Sailer:

The Democrats are the party of dying alone.

Ouch.