Quote for the Day

From Theodore Dalrymple's "In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas":

A strange kind of moral fervor supervenes, an illustration of a phenomenon akin to a law of thermodynamics: namely, the law of the conservation of righteous indignation, which, if it does not attach to one thing, will attach to another. It is as if the total fund of such indignation is of constant size. As traditional moral prohibitions, inhibitions, and considerations are destroyed by the gnawing criticism of philosophical disputatiousness, new ones rush in to fill the vacuum.