The Strange Death of Europe Quotes

“When it comes to anti-fascism in most of Western Europe, there would appear for now to be a supply-and-demand problem: the demand for fascists vastly outstrips the actual supply.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“To immerse oneself in popular culture for any length of time is to wallow in an almost unbearable shallowness. Was the sum of European endeavour and achievement really meant to culminate in this?”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“In such a view of society, however greatly you might wish to benefit from an endless supply of cheap labour, a wider range of cuisine or the salving of a generation’s conscience, you still would not have a right to wholly transform your society. Because that which you inherited that is good should also be passed on. Even were you to decide that some of the views or lifestyles of your ancestors could be improved upon, it does not follow that you should hand over to the next generation a society that is chaotic, fractured and unrecognisable.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“[They] may have for instance taken the view of Edmund Burke, who in the 18th century made the central conservative insight; that a culture and a society are not things run for the convenience of the people who happen to be here right now, but is a deep pact between the dead, the living, and those yet to be born.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“A country that believes it has never done any wrong is a country that could do wrong at any time. But a country that believes it has only done wrong, or done such a terrible, unalleviated amount of wrong in the past, is likely to become a country that is inclined to doubt its ability to ever do any good in the future.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“Those who believe Europe is for the world have never explained why this process should be one way: why Europeans going anywhere else in the world is colonialism whereas the rest of the world coming to Europe is just and fair.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“Europeans have been deflating the language of anti-fascism ahead of a time when they might need it.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“Only Europeans and their descendants remember guilt. So only Europeans and their descendants have continuously to atone for it.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“To immerse oneself in popular culture for any length of time is to wallow in an almost unbearable shallowness.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“For the Church of Sweden, the Church of England, the German Lutheran Church and many other branches of European Christianity, the message of the religion has become a form of left-wing politics, diversity action and social welfare projects.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“T. S. Eliot memorably described it, an effort at ‘dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good’.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“If the burden of working for little reward in an isolating society stripped of any overriding purpose can be recognised to have an effect on individuals, how could it not also be said to have an effect on society as a whole? Or to put it the other way around, if enough people in a society are suffering from a form of exhaustion, might it not be that the society they are living in has become exhausted?”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“The Bible had at best become like the work of Ovid or Homer: containing great truth, but not itself true.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“A succession of philosophers and historians spent their time studiously attempting to say nothing as successfully as possible. The less that was successfully said, the greater the relief and acclaim. No attempt to address any idea, history or fact was able to pass without first being put through the pit-stop of the modern academy. No generality could be attempted and no specific could be uttered.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“For present-day politicians there are only political points to be made from such statements, and the larger the sin the larger the outrage, the larger the apology and the larger the potential political gain for sorrow expressed. Through such statements political leaders can gain the benefits of magnanimity without the stain of involvement: the person making the apology had done nothing wrong and all the people who could have received the apology are dead.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“A society that says we are defined exclusively by the bar and the nightclub , by self-indulgence and our sense of entitlement, cannot be said to have deep roots or much likelihood of survival. But, a society which holds that our culture consists of the cathedral, the playhouse and the playing field, the shopping mall and Shakespeare, has a chance.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“The dreams of communism and socialism were the sincerest attempts of their day to come up with and put into practice a theory of everything. The endless writings and pamphlets and evangelism in every country of Europe were one more attempt to dream a meaningful dream, capable of solving everything and addressing the problems of everyone. It was, as T. S. Eliot memorably described it, an effort at ‘dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good’.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“They are an American Delegation who are doing a tour of the region to apologize for the crusades', said Arafat. Then he, and his guest, burst out laughing. They both knew that America had little or no involvement in the wars of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. But Arafat, at any rate, was happy to indulge the affliction of anyone who believed they had and use it to his own political advantage.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“The further Fascism receded into history and the fewer visible fascists there were on display, the more self-proclaimed anti-fascists needed fascism to retain any semblance of political virtue or purpose. It proved politically useful to describe as fascist people who were not Fascists , just as it proved politically useful to describe as racist people who were not racists.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“Early in her public career a friend had asked Hirsi Ali, ‘Don’t you realise how small this country is, and how explosive it is, what you’re saying?’ As she recounted her response in her autobiography, ‘Explosive? In a country where prostitution and soft drugs are licit, where euthanasia and abortion are practised, where men cry on TV and naked people walk on the beach and the pope is joked about on national TV? Where the famous author Gerard Reve is renowned for having fantasized about making love with a donkey, an animal he used as a metaphor for God? Surely nothing I could say would be seen as anything close to “explosive” in such a context.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“And so all the time the European brain has held onto two contradictory things. The first is the dominant established narrative of a generation: that anyone in the world can come to Europe and become a European, and that in order to become a European you merely need to be a person in Europe. The other part of the European brain has spent these years watching and waiting. This part could always recognise that the new arrivals were not only coming in unprecedented numbers but were bringing with them customs that, if not all unprecedented, had certainly not existed in Europe for a long time. The first part of the brain insists that the newcomers will assimilate and that, given time, even the most hard-to-swallow aspects of the culture of the new arrivals will become more recognisably European. Optimism favours the first part of the brain. Events favour the second, which increasingly begins to wonder whether anyone has the time for the changes that are meant to happen.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“All around us we have the wreckage – metaphorical and real – of all our dreams, our religions, our political ideologies and a thousand other aspirations, all of which in their turn have proved false. And though we have no more illusions or ambitions left, yet we are still here. So what do we do?”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“Such visible failure and a sense of lost moorings can be – for the individual as for society – not only a cause for concern but an exhausting emotional process. Where once there was an overriding explanation (however many troubles that brought), now there is only an overriding uncertainty and question. And we cannot unlearn our knowledge.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“Their priority has been not to clamp down on the thing to which the public are objecting but, rather, to the objecting public. If anybody wanted a textbook case on how politics goes wrong, here is one.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“Efforts to silence the people who raised their voice – whether through violence, intimidation or the courts – meant that three decades after the Rushdie affair there was almost no one in Europe who would dare write a novel, compose a piece of music or even draw an image that might risk Muslim anger. Indeed, they ran in the other direction. Politicians and almost everybody else went out of their way to show how much they admired Islam.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“By 2015 more British Muslims were fighting for Isis than for the British armed forces.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“in June 2016, when the UN accused the Ertrean government of committing crimes against humanity, thousands of Eritrean protested outside the UN building in Geneva. The Swiss people had been told, like everyone else in Europe, that here were poeple who had come to Switzerland because they were fleeing a government they could not live under Yet, thousands of them turned out to support that same government when someone in Europe criticized them.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“Even before the First World War there was a strain in European art and music – in Germany more than anywhere – that was turning from ripeness to over-ripeness and then into something else. The last strains of the Austro-German Romantic tradition – exemplified by Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Gustav Klimt – seemed almost to have destroyed itself by reaching a pitch of ripeness from which nothing could follow other than complete breakdown. It was not just that their subject matter was so death-obsessed, but that the tradition felt as though it could not be stretched any further or innovated any more without snapping. And so it snapped: in modernism and then post-modernism.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“Nevertheless, the idea that Europeans have simply stopped having enough children and must as a result ensure that the next generation is comprised of immigrants is a disastrous fallacy for several reasons. The first is because of the mistaken assumption that a country’s population should always remain the same or indeed continue rising. The nation states of Europe include some of the most densely populated countries on the planet. It is not at all obvious that the quality of life in these countries will improve if the population continues growing. What is more, when migrants arrive in these countries they move to the big cities, not to the remaining sparsely populated areas. So although among European states Britain, along with Belgium and the Netherlands, is one of the most densely populated countries, England taken on its own would be the second most densely populated country in Europe. Migrants tend not to head to the Highlands of Scotland or the wilds of Dartmoor. And so a constantly increasing population causes population problems in areas that are already suffering housing supply problems and where infrastructure like public transport struggles to keep up with swiftly expanding populations.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“But if the views of some migrant communities on homosexuality were only a couple of generations out of date, the views of portions of those communities on the subject of women were shown to be out of date by many centuries, at least.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam