The War on the West Quotes

“For Nietzsche, one of the dangers of the men of ressentiment is that they will achieve their ultimate form of revenge, which is to turn happy people into unhappy people like themselves—to shove their misery into the faces of the happy so that in due course the happy “start to be ashamed of their happiness and perhaps say to one another: ‘It’s a disgrace to be happy!”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“If it is agreed that everybody did bad things in the past, then it is possible to move on and even to move beyond it. Who wants to litigate a past in which nobody’s ancestors were saints? Some people do, and they have decided that they can do so by re-framing the history of slavery through their own specifically anti-Western lens.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“In recent years, the critics of the West have marked themselves out through a set of extraordinary claims. Their technique now has a pattern. It is to zoom in on Western behavior, remove it from the context of the time, set aside any non-Western parallels, and then exaggerate what the West actually did.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“If you do not respect my past, then why should I respect yours? If you do not respect my culture, then why should I respect yours? If you do not respect my forebears, then why should I respect yours? And if you do not like what my society has produced, then why should I agree to your having a place in it?”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“In all matters, whether to do with money, sex, or anything else, no man feels that the scales are weighted in his favor. And so just as the men of resentment talk about “justice” while meaning “revenge,” so it is that something is disguised within their talk of “equality.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“The only possible demand at the endpoint of deconstruction is to deconstruct some more. And it seems possible to pull apart and find cause for resentment endlessly. Certainly, that is the hope of the deconstructionists, who now scour the world of art and look for symbols of rape, male dominance, privilege, racism, and much more.10 And of course they find things to occupy their time.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“There are many attitudes that we all take in our lives, some of which dominate at one point in our lives and recede in another. But a life lived without gratitude is not a life properly lived. It is a life that is lived off-kilter: one in which, incapable of realizing what you have to be thankful for, you are left with nothing but your resentments and can be contented by nothing but revenge.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“People began to talk of “equality,” but they did not seem to care about equal rights. They talked of “anti-racism,” but they sounded deeply racist. They spoke of “justice,” but they seemed to mean “revenge.” It”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“This is the process by which everything from the past can be picked over, picked apart, and eventually destroyed. It can find no way of building. It can only find a way of endlessly pulling apart. So a novel by Jane Austen is taken apart until a delicate work of fiction is turned instead into nothing more than another piece of guilty residue from a discredited civilization. What has been achieved in this? Nothing but a process of destruction.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“But they praise any culture so long as it is not Western solely and simply in order to denigrate and devalue the West. As a result, they reach their final end argument, which is to demand why anyone should admire or wish to continue a civilization that has done so much wrong and had such bigotry and hatred built in throughout its history.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“Without gratitude, the prevailing attitudes of life are blame and resentment.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“People began to talk of “equality,” but they did not seem to care about equal rights. They talked of “anti-racism,” but they sounded deeply racist. They spoke of “justice,” but they seemed to mean “revenge.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“Always at the hands of people who range from the semi-informed to the uninformed.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“Not the least of them is that while the West is assaulted for everything it has done wrong, it now gets no credit for having got anything right.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“The more places scholars could see invisible racism, the more popular they became.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“Twenty-two percent of people who identified as “very liberal” said they thought the police shot at least ten thousand unarmed black men in a year. Among self-identified liberals, fully 40 percent thought the figure was between one thousand and ten thousand. The actual figure was somewhere around ten.20”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“All the years of education and learning, all the knowledge and experience in that head was destroyed in a moment by people who had achieved none of those things.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“To delegitimize the West, it appears to be necessary first to demonize the people who still make up the racial majority in the West. It is necessary to demonize white people.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“Why should “gratitude” be an emotion that is denied to the devil? Dostoevsky leaves this unanswered. But it is worth reflecting on.

For acts of deconstruction and destruction can be performed with extraordinary ease. Such ease that they might as well be the habits of the devil. A great building such as a church or a cathedral can take decades — even centuries — to build. But it can be burned to the ground or otherwise brought down in an afternoon. Similarly, the most delicate canvas or work of art can be the product of years of craft and labor, and it can be destroyed in a moment. The human body is the same. I once read a particular detail of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. A gang of Hutus had been at their work and among the people they macheted that day was a Tutsi doctor. As his brains spilled out onto the roadside, one of his killers mocked the idea that these were meant to be the brains of a doctor. How did his learning look now?

All the years of education and learning, all the knowledge and experience in that head was destroyed in a moment by people who had achieved none of those things.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“Hume and Kant set the foundations in their work for the arguments that would make racism untenable. They helped to expose its fundamental flaws. For instance, Hume argued “that morality is based on humans’ natural attunement to one another’s feelings and a discomfort at sensing others’ discomfort that can be elevated into more impartial justice.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“They regard it as barbaric and unenlightened. They look down on those who have not joined their group of the elect, especially those who they believe have seen what they have seen and yet come to different conclusions. Crucially, this new religion constitutes something to do. With any and all other grand narratives collapsed, the religion of antiracism fills people with purpose and a sense of meaning. It gives them drive and allows them to see where they are going. It allows them to imagine a perfectible upland toward which they and everyone else on earth might strive. It imbues them with confidence, and consolation, dividing the society they are in between saints and sinners in a way that gives them the illusion of great perception. Perhaps most crucially, it also allows them to war on what were their own origins. The appeal of this conflict should not be underestimated. It is a very deep-seated instinct, the instinct to destroy, to burn, and to spit on everything that has produced you.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“Like all societies in history, all Western nations have racism in their histories. But that is not the only history of our countries. Racism is not the sole lens through which our societies can be understood, and yet it is increasingly the only lens used. Everything in the past is seen as racist, and so everything in the past is tainted.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“The issue of reparations now comes clown not to descendants of one group paying money to descendants of another group. Rather, it comes down to people who look like the people to whom a wrong was done in history receiving money from people who look like the people who may have done the wrong. lt is hard to imagine anything more likely to rip apart a society than attempting a wealth transfer based on this principle.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“Only a person who feels he will lose will demand equality as a universal principle…People can only be equal in respect of those characteristics having the least value. Equality as a purely rational idea can never stimulate desire, will, or emotion. But resentment, in whose eyes the higher values never find favor, conceals its nature in the demand for equality. In reality, it wants nothing less than the destruction of all those who embody those higher values which arouse its anger… Just as we are not up against justice but rather up against vengeance, so we are not truly up only against proponents of equality, but also against those who hold a pathological desire for destruction.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason

“Marx is the last or (depending on how you count it) the originating prophet. He was not just a thinker or a sage -he was the formulator of a world-revolutionary movement. A movement that claimed to know how to reorder absolutely wverything in human affairs in order to arrive at a utopian society. A utopian society that has never been achieved but that activists across the West still dream of instituting next time: always next time.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“Marx is the last or (depending on how you count it) the originating prophet. He was not just a thinker or a sage -he was the formulator of a world-revolutionary movement. A movement that claimed to know how to reorder absolutely everything in human affairs in order to arrive at a utopian society. A utopian society that has never been achieved but that activists across the West still dream of instituting next time: always next time.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“It is one of the saddest realizations we have as a species: not just that everything is transitory but that everything—particularly everything we love and into which love has been poured—is fragile. And that just as the line between civilization and barbarism is paper-thin, so it is a miracle that anything at all survives, given the fragility of all things plus the evil and carelessness of which men are capable.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“Eventually everything becomes viewed through the same negative, hostile light, even in the arts, where works created in a spirit of generosity, sincerity, and tribute are now labeled as works of “appropriation” or “colonialism.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“For Nietzsche, one of the dangers of the men of ressentiment is that they will achieve their ultimate form of revenge, which is to turn happy people into unhappy people like themselves—to shove their misery into the faces of the happy so that in due course the happy “start to be ashamed of their happiness and perhaps say to one another: ‘It’s a disgrace to be happy! There is too much misery!’” This is something that must be averted, for the sick, says Nietzsche, must not make the healthy sick too, or make the healthy “confuse themselves with the sick.”5”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“The more important task of life is to recognize what you do not have while being grateful for what you do.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West