Douglas Murray

"We do live in a society in which victimhood is the main goal. To be a victim and to be on the victim hierarchy, to have the delicious opportunity to be the most victimized person is clearly the aspiration. Weve all seen it in our lives when people pick up the microphone in a Q&A and say Speaking as..., and I think Ah, everything that is going to come afterwards is going to be garbage. And then theyll say something about their lived experience, as if there is any other kind of experience. In my unlived experience...?"

"One of the strange habits of our time is the one in which a self-appointed class roams the land, hands cupped to their ear, hoping to discern something they can identify as a ‘dog-whistle’... One oddity of the whole business of trying to hear dog-whistles is very basic: if you can hear the whistle, you must surely be the dog. It is the nature of the analogy that a non-canid cannot hear what the dog hears. So to be able to hear on a whole different aural wave-length to everyone else – to be peculiarly attuned to the tones of the time and to be able to explain to everyone else – is one heck of a power to bestow upon yourself."

"I regard a lot of these modern social movements as being forms of spilt Christianity or residue Christianity which the people engaging in it dont recognize and would be quite annoyed by if told this. Nevertheless, as you say very visible, recognizable aspects of Christianity are interwoven in this. But heres the difference and heres the fatally important difference: What is being offered at the moment is a form of secularized Christianity, without any ethic of redemption and that is dangerous. Very, very dangerous. The great brilliance of Christianity is the concept of redemption. The possibility of successfully atoning for sins. Take away the possibility of successful atonement, and all you have is a perpetual cycle of guilt and I believe that is what underlies a lot of the unhappiness in our societies today."

"Discussions of minority interests are one way of claiming political virtue."

"[Friedrich Nietzsche] said somebody must stand over the life of the person of resentment and say to them at some point: You are right. You have reason to be resentful. There is somebody who has ruined your life. There is somebody who has held you back. The person is you. Now, that is probably the least pleasant thing to hear and probably one of the hardest things to ever say. How can a politician, should a politician, say to certain people You know, you have screwed up your life, and its been your responsibility and your fault. You can turn it around, but if you dont want to, youll still be the only person to blame."

"I see no reason why every other country in the world should be prevented from feeling pride in itself because the Germans mucked up twice in a century. In Europe, in particular, nationalism after all sounds different depending on the country youre in. Nationalism in Israel sounds different to nationalism in America, sounds different to nationalism in Italy, sounds different to nationalism here in Britain."

"[At] Stanford, it turned out there is roughly one HR person on staff or faculty for every student. It would be cheaper get everyone a butler. And much more useful. And it would make me want to go to Stanford."

"Those who believe Europe is for the world have never explained why this process should be one way: why Europeans going anywhere else in the world is colonialism whereas the rest of the world coming to Europe is just and fair."

"If the burden of working for little reward in an isolating society stripped of any overriding purpose can be recognised to have an effect on individuals, how could it not also be said to have an effect on society as a whole? Or to put it the other way around, if enough people in a society are suffering from a form of exhaustion, might it not be that the society they are living in has become exhausted?"

"A country that believes it has never done any wrong is a country that could do wrong at any time. But a country that believes it has only done wrong, or done such a terrible, unalleviated amount of wrong in the past, is likely to become a country that is inclined to doubt its ability to ever do any good in the future."

"To immerse oneself in popular culture for any length of time is to wallow in an almost unbearable shallowness."

"Campaign groups which used to oppose neo-Nazis realized that there weren’t sufficient Nazis to justify their business models. They decided that, henceforth, attacking parties such as Ukip should also come under their anti-fascist remit. Soon anybody who opposed supranational institutions or sought to restrict immigration found themselves labelled as beyond the pale. It meant that the views of the majority of the public — in Britain and elsewhere — effectively became defined as far right. In recent years this terminological mission-creep has morphed from being annoying to being disturbing. For if everybody is a fascist, then nobody is. And anyone who knows the scene across Europe will understand that we may well have need of these terms."