Category: Thought

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.

Theodore Dalrymple, in “Our Culture, What’s Left Of It,” by Jamie Glazov, FrontPage Magazine, August 31, 2005.

But — to put it brutally — you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and the Bolshevist leaders are just as indifferent to the casualties that may be involved in their drive toward socialization as any General during the World War who ordered a costly attack in order to show his superiors that he and his division possessed the proper soldierly spirit. In fact, the Bolsheviki are more indifferent because they are animated by fanatical conviction.

Walter Duranty, perhaps more than hinting at the extent of the devastation he was otherwise covering up for the Soviets. “Special Cable to The New York Times,” The New York Times, New York, March 31, 1933, page 13.

Let us honour if we can  
The vertical man  
Though we value none  
But the horizontal one.

W. H. Auden, included in The Collected Shorter Poems of W. H. Auden, 1927–1957 (1964), and also retrievable from numerous websites. See also “Law Like Love.”

Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn “reasonable” and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive.

Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here (1935).

Power, like a desolating pestilence, 
Pollutes whate’er it touches; and obedience, 
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, 
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame 
A mechanized automaton.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab (1813), Canto III.

The truth is a trap: you can not get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you.

The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1854.

Image, above, is a caricature of Kierkegaard published in The Corsair, a satirical journal.

I used to say to our audiences: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (1935).

As social animals, we live in a narrow but apparently logical world with a well-defined identity and position. But man is the satellite of a double-star; there is also an inner-world that seems to have a completely different set of laws from the rational universe.

Colin Wilson, Bernard Shaw: A Reassessment (1969), p. 167.

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

Iris Murdoch, as quoted in The Observer, September 13, 1987.

Also by Iris Murdoch on this site:

“We know that the real lesson to be taught…”

The vitality of the ordinary members of society is dependent on its Outsiders.

Colin Wilson, The Outsider (1956), chapter three, “The Romantic Outsider.”