Saturday, October 19, 2024

Life at the bottom by Theodore Dalrymple. Quotes II

 -It is a way of life, not poverty per se, that kills.

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

-The squalor in England was not economic, but spiritual, moral, and cultural. 

-There is no self-discipline, but rather an imperative obedience to impulse. 

-The life of the slum was not the only life there was. 

-Man is at least as much a problem-creating as a problem-solving animal. 

-If no absorbing interest has developed in childhood and adolescence, such an interest is soon manufactured from the materials at hand. 

-Life is a biography. 

-The absence of standards, as Ortega y Gasset remarked, is the beginning of barbarism. 

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