Douglas Murray Quotes

In this room we're all here together, but there's probably a lot of different views, people sitting here thinking, I don't own any slaves, all the slaves are dead. Why am I responsible? My family were immigrants, too.

Australians of this generation should not be required to accept guilt and blame for past actions and policies over which they had no control.

We may pretend that we're basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.

To the New England mind, roads, schools, clothes, and a clean face were connected as part of the law of order or divine system. Bad roads meant bad morals. The moral of this Virginia road was clear, and the boy fully learned it. Slavery was wicked, and slavery was the cause of this road’s badness which amounted to [a] social crime.

If we are to put the past on trial, where do we stop?

In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.

If the history of the Day of Atonement has anything to say to us now it is: never relieve individuals of moral responsibility. The more we have, the more we grow.

Muslims are gradually being excluded from the official positions altogether …. any answer for their degeneracy is one of the results of our political ignorance and neglect

Of God and Evil, there is nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common Rule of Good and Evil, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves.

It is almost certain that we will fail. But how will future history judge the German people, if not even a handful of men had the courage to put an end to that criminal?

Many an act that man does is right or wrong according to the time and place which form, so to speak, its context; strip it of its surrounding circumstances, and you tear away its meaning. Gentlemen reformers, beware of this common practice of yours! Beware of calling an act evil on Tuesday because that same act was evil on Monday!

If a nation cannot face its past, it has no future.

...if our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people, the British empire would not have been made.

It is in vain to allege that our ancestors brought them [Negro slaves] hither and not we. We inherit our ample patrimony with all its encumbrances and are bound to pay the debts of our ancestors. This debt particularly we are bound to discharge…. To give them [slaves] liberty, and stop here, is to entail upon them a curse.

The American government cannot escape its history.

It is true that [the] present-day young are idealistic. But theirs is the easy idealism that condemns abuses and pushes aside any thought that would reveal the difficulties and complexities inherent in righting wrongs. They are not willing to do the hard work by which alone the world can be improved. Hearing what they say, and seeing what they do, one suspects that one of the main functions of the young’s idealism is finding good reasons for doing bad things.

Indifference to Reality. All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.

We've yet to deal with the uncomfortable history of England being involved in the transatlantic slave trade, whereas America has at least made some movies dealing with its racial history.

Evil prevails when good people do nothing.

We must recognise that duty and morality vary under different circumstances; not that the man who resists evil is doing what is always and in itself wrong, but that in the different circumstances in which he is placed it may become even his duty to resist evil.

The good, we do it; the evil, that is fortune; man is always right, and destiny always wrong.

Good and evil - I don't believe that there is hanging out there, anywhere, something called good and something called evil.

Evil depends on where you're standing.

Postmodernism entices us with the siren call of liberation and creativity, but it may be an invitation to intellectual and moral suicide.

We must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers .