Theodore Dalrymple said this quote

To regret religion is to regret Western civilization.

~ Theodore Dalrymple

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

~ Theodore Dalrymple

Music escapes ideological characterization. Just as there are some social scientists who believe that what cannot be measured does not truly exist, and some psychologists used to believe that consciousness does not exist because it cannot be observed by instruments, so ideologists find anything that escapes their conceptual framework threatening - because ideologists want a simple principle, or a few simple principles, by which all things may be judged. When I was a student, I lived with a hard-line dialectical materialist who said that Schubert was a typical petit bourgeois pessimist, whose music would die out once objective causes for pessimism ceased to exist. But I suspect that even he was not entirely happy with this formulation.

~ Theodore Dalrymple

Demonstrative proof is lacking, but if we thought only about those things about which such proof were available, our minds would be empty most of the time.

~ Theodore Dalrymple