If the history of the 20th Century proved anything, it proved that however bad things were, human ingenuity … - Theodore Dalrymple

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I can remember in early elementary school when the Russians launched the first satellite. There was still so much unknown about space. People thought Mars was probably populated.

Theodore Dalrymple

If the history of the 20th Century proved anything, it proved that however bad things were, human ingenuity could usually find a way to make them worse.

Century, Ingenuity, Proved, Things, Usually, Way

Same Author Quotes

The idea that man is a tabula rasa, or Mao's sheet of blank paper upon which the most beautiful characters can be written, is an old one with disastrous implications. I do not think though that the cults you mention could survive honest thought about human nature.

Beautiful, Character, Mention, Thinking, Though, Written

The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one's whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexities of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved.

Begins, Enslaved, Human, Ideas, Law, Men

Life is a biography, not a series of disconnected moments, more or less pleasurable but increasingly tedious and unsatisfying unless one imposes a purposive pattern upon them.

Biographies, Biography, Life, Life Is, Patterns, Pleasurable

Orders can be benign or malign, but the habit of obeying them can become ingrained.

Benign, Habit, Ingrained, Obeying, Order

Obesity is the result of a loss of self-control. Indeed, loss of self-control might be said to be the defining social (or anti-social) characteristic of our age: public drunkenness, excessive gambling, promiscuity and common-or-garden rudeness are all examples of our collective loss of self-control.

Age, Drunkenness, Gambling, Garden, Loss, Said