A society that says we are defined exclusively by the bar and the nigh — 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...?"

"Edmund Burke made the central conservative insight; that a culture and a society are not things run for the convenience of the people who happen to be here right now, but is a deep pact between the dead, the living, and those yet to be born."

"Mark Steyn for instance wrote a wonderful book [...] Bat Yeor of course, a great scholar, a great writer, with famous Eurabia [...] More than half the children in Amsterdam schools are non-Dutch [...] It will happen during our lifetime. This is not the distant future. 11 years until you lose the Netherlands."

"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."

"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."

"If there is a punishment for telling the truth, then many people will tell lies. If telling lies is incentivized, then many people will tell lies. And if you allow mobs of people online or off to intimidate people and don’t stand up to them, then many people will be intimidated. And they will change what they say accordingly."