Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Theodore Dalrymple

Quote by Theodore Dalrymple

“Miserabilism leads to a mixture of indifference towards the past and hatred of it. This hatred is visible in the architecture and urban planning of Europe since the war. [...] This mania for destruction, often carried out in lesser degrees by the strategic placement of a terrible building that the eye cannot escape (the Tour Montparnasse in Paris is a particularly fine example of the genre), is a symptom of an impotent rage that Europe has been left behind, is not longer in the vanguard of anything. It is also a kind of magical thinking: that by adopting the externals of modernity somehow modernity itself will be achieved and mastered.”

Quote by Theodore Dalrymple

Book:The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism
Create image

Work

The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Theodore Dalrymple
Theodore Dalrymple

Theodore Dalrymple, born Anthony Daniels, is a British writer, physician, and critic. Born on October 11, 1949, he is known for his profound insights into political, social, and moral issues. Dalrymple's work often delves into the complexities of modern society, exploring challenges such as poverty, crime, and the decline of morality. more

You May Also Like

“When we aren’t aiming to be either precise or conclusive, it can be easy to agree on what a beautiful man-made place might look like. Attempts to name the world’s most attractive cities tend to settle on some familiar locations: Edinburgh, Paris, Rome, San Francisco. A case will occasionally be made for Siena or Sydney. Someone may bring up St Petersburg or Salamanca. Further evidence of our congruent tastes can be found in the patterns of our holiday migrations. Few people opt to spend the summer in Milton Keynes or Frankfurt. Nevertheless, our intuitions about attractive architecture have always proved of negligible use in generating satisfactory laws of beauty. We might expect that it would, by now, have grown as easy to reproduce a city with the appeal of Bath as it is to manufacture consistent quantities of blueberry jam. If humans were at some point adept at creating a masterwork of urban design, it should have come within the grasp of all succeeding generations to contrive an equally successful environment at will. There ought to be no need to pay homage to a city as to a rare creature; its virtues should be readily fitted to the development of any new piece of meadow or scrubland. There should be no need to focus our energies on preservation and restoration, disciplines which thrive on our fears of our own ineptitude. We should not have to feel alarmed by the waters that lap threateningly against Venice’s shoreline. We should have the confidence to surrender the aristocratic palaces to the sea, knowing that we could at any point create new edifices that would rival the old stones in beauty.”

DesignTravelArchitectureUrban Planning
Book:The Architecture of Happiness
Create image

“There are three key attributes that make people happy in their communities and cause them to develop a solid emotional attachment to the place they live in. The first is the physical beauty and the level of maintenance of the place itself - great open spaces and parks, historic buildings, and an attention to community aesthetics. The second is the ease with which people can meet others, make friends, and plug into social networks. The third piece of the happiness puzzle is the level of diversity, open-mindedness, and acceptance: Is there some equality of opportunity for all? Can anyone - everyone - contribute to and take pleasure from the community?”

EconomicsUrban PlanningSmart Growth
Book:The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity
Create image

“Infrastructure is always hugely expensive, and there's no clear way to measure the overall future return on investment, whether it's in the form of innovation, development, or new communities or jobs. Infrastructure provides a skeleton on which to grow a new economic model. The infrastructure investments we make now will determine the kind of economy we have in the future.”

Urban PlanningSmart GrowthInfrastructure Investment
Book:The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity
Create image

“The neighbourhood is a social construct that enables people to live, work and play together in close quarters with a feeling of engagement and security beyond their existence as individuals. (...) a sense of scale and community that is manageable, more village-like than urban. The most attractive neighbourhoods [are] the ones where there’s a palpable sense of an open, rather than closed community. Being a good neighbour is not about watching from behind your curtains and reporting any suspected misdemeanour to the police - it’s about inhabiting your neighbourhood beyond the curtains, bringing life to your street with open arms, not closed minds.”

CommunityBelongingCityUrban PlanningScaleNeighbourhood
Book:How to Live in the City
Create image

“Once upon a time the general problem of the City Chaotic looked so simple. Boulevards and civic monuments were going to create the City Beautiful. After that proved insufficient, regional plans were to create the City Sensible. These proved unacceptable and now we are struggling, sometimes it seems at the expense of everything else, to improvise the City Traversible.”

TransportationUrban Planning
Book:Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs
Create image

“You are no longer human, with all those depths and highs and nuances of emotion that define you as a person. There is no feeling any more, because to feel any emotion would also be to beckon the overwhelming blackness from you. My mind has now locked all this down. And without any control of this self-defence mechanism my subconscious has operated. I do not feel any more.”

Mental HealthDissociationTraumatizedDehumanizationDissociativeDissociatedCombat PtsdNo Longer HumanDehumanizedMilitary PtsdDissociative Ptsd
Book:Among You: The Extraordinary True Story of a Soldier Broken By War
Create image