Book project

In 2008 I received a book-writing grant from the prestigious Freedom of Expression Foundation, Oslo, Norway. The resulting book was launched in Oslo on 6 May 2010.

Quotes

No one has the right to legislate the truth. It can only be discovered by free inquiry, and that includes investigations that may make people uncomfortable.

Steven Pinker, in a letter of 09.12.2009 (quoted e.g. here) to then Rector Laurits B. Holm-Nielsen at Aarhus University, commenting on the proceedings against Professor Helmuth Nyborg taking place in Denmark at that time

A people that forgets its ancestors will care little for its descendants.

G. K. Chesterton, quoted by Ricardo Duchesne in his book review Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest, March 2012

Multiculturalism is an effort to destroy the uniqueness of Western nations. My book hopes to encourage Westerners to recover and affirm their exceptional historical identity.

Ricardo Duchesne, concluding his Reply to Mark Elvin (a reply to Elvin's review of Duchesne's book The Uniqueness of Western Civilization)

In order to really be able to belong somewhere, others have to agree that you belong there.

Noor Jdid, interviewed by Asma Chaudhry, Northernchowk, 26.07.2013

God gives a reward for gentleness which He will never give for harshness.

The Prophet Muhammad, quoted by Charles Le Gai Eaton in The Concept of Justice in Islam

Devotion to Jihad for the sake of Allah, and the desire to shed blood, to smash skulls and to sever limbs for the sake of Allah and in defense of His religion, is, undoubtedly, an honor for the believer.

Mohamad al-Arefe, on MEMRI-TV, quoted in The Spectator, 27.06.2013

The less they know, the less they know it.

Edward Feser, commenting on the intellectual state of adherents of secularism, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism (Kindle Location 208)

They played the Bohemian Rap City.

Steven Pinker, quoting oronyms discovered by teachers reading their student's term papers and homework assignments, The Language Instinct, page 161

Human evolution did not halt in the distant past but has continued to the present day. The ancestral human population of 50,000 years ago differed greatly from the anatomically modern humans of 100,000 years ago, and people today have had just as long to evolve away from the ancestral population. The human genome bears many marks of recent evolution, prompted by adaptations to events such as cultural changes or new diseases. More visible evidence of recent evolution is the existence of human races. After the dispersal of the ancestral population from Africa 50,000 years ago, human evolution continued independently in each continent. The populations of the world’s major geographical regions bred for many thousand years in substantial isolation from each other and started to develop distinctive features, a genetic differentiation which is the basis for today’s races.

Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, page 9

If a detectable degree of local genetic differentiation has developed in Iceland in a mere 1,000 years, much greater differences are likely to have arisen among populations in the rest of the world, much of which has been settled for 40 times longer and where there have been many social and geographic impediments to the free flow of genes.

Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, page 97

It is often assumed that evolution works too slowly for any significant change in human nature to have occurred within the last 10,000 or even 50,000 years. But this assumption is incorrect. The development of new brain gene alleles 37,000 and 6,000 years ago, and of lactose tolerance 5,000 years ago, have already been mentioned; several other instances of recent human evolution are cited in chapter 12. There is no reason to suppose that human nature ceased to evolve at some finishing post in the distant past or to assume, as do some evolutionary psychologists, that people are struggling to function in modern societies with Stone Age minds. Genomes adapt to current circumstances or perish; the human genome is unlikely to be an exception. Human societies have progressed through several major transitions in the last 15,000 years, and it may well be that these transformations were accompanied by evolutionary as well as cultural changes. It was only after people had become less violent that they were able to abandon the nomadic life of hunting and gathering that they had followed for the last 5 million years, and began to settle down. The first settled societies appeared in the Near East some 15,000 years ago.

Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, page 178

Our bones are more gracile than those of our Upper Paleolithic ancestors, our personalities less aggressive, our societies more trusting and cohesive. An element of human choice, a preference for negotiation over annihilation, has perhaps been injected into the genome. And that might explain why there is an inescapable sense of progress about human evolution over the last 50,000 years: human choice has imposed a direction on the blind forces that hitherto have shaped evolution’s random walk. In parallel with human social evolution, the human physical form continued to evolve. Because the human population was dispersed across different continents, between which distance and hostility allowed little gene flow, the people on each continent followed independent evolutionary paths. It was these independent trajectories that led over the generations to the emergence of a variety of human races.

Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, page 180

Genetics are likely to provide ever greater detail about how individuals vary, how men and women have different interests and abilities, and how races differ.

Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, page 266

The belief that human evolution is essentially complete rests on the conjecture that it moves too slowly for significant changes to have occurred recently, for instance within the last 50,000 years. But the human genome, just like those of all other species, can adapt quite quickly to changes in the environment. Without this capacity, humans would long ago have lapsed into extinction. At least four types of recent evolutionary change have already become evident and many more will doubtless come to light. The recent genetic changes already discovered include defenses against disease; increases in fertility; responses to cultural changes that affect the human environment; and changes in cognitive behavior.

Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, page 268

The other cognitive change is one that can be inferred from the striking recent rise to prominence of versions of two brain genes. As described in chapter 5, the genes first came to light because mutated versions cause microcephaly, a condition in which people are born with an unusually small head and brain. The new version of the microcephalin gene appeared around 37,000 years ago, rapidly became more common under intense selective pressure, and is now carried by most people in Europe and East Asia. The other gene, a new version of ASPM, emerged 6,000 years ago and is now carried by 44% of Caucasians. Both genes are thought to be involved in determining the number of neurons formed in the cerebral cortex in the early embryo. The rapid spread of these two alleles indicates that the human brain has been subject to intense evolutionary pressures in the recent past and may still be evolving. These instances of recent evolutionary change are probably just the first of many that remain to be discovered. Since all occurred after the dispersal from Africa, the alleles that cause them are present to a different extent in different populations. Human diversity therefore cannot be a purely cultural phenomenon, as many social scientists sometimes seem to believe. It has a genetic component too. The component remains to be defined and quantified, but it could prove to be substantial.

Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, page 271

No. That is a myth that some here want to create: that it's supposedly illegal or unacceptable in Norway to have different opinions on immigration.

Norway's Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, to Spiegel Online, 10.10.2011

Humanists believe that humanity improves along with the growth of knowledge, but the belief that the increase of knowledge goes with advances in civilization is an act of faith. They see the realization of human potential as the goal of history, when rational inquiry shows history to have no goal. They exalt nature, while insisting that humankind—an accident of nature—can overcome the natural limits that shape the lives of other animals. Plainly absurd, this nonsense gives meaning to the lives of people who believe they have left all myths behind.

John N. Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths, quoted in book review by Robert W. Merry, The Fallacy of Human Freedom, The National Interest, July-August, 2013

Today, the dead end of western culture is no longer theoretical; it is contained as anxiety and absurdity in the everyday way of life.

Christos Yannaras, Elements of Faith: An Introduction to Orthodox Theology (page 164)

Like clothes, gender fits the preformed human body and mind, even though on occasion it is a bit of a squeeze.

Frank Salter, The War against Human Nature II - Gender Studies, Quadrant Magazine, July-August 2012

The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.

Attritubet by some to George Orwell (disputed)

The European Union rejects theories which attempt to determine the existence of separate human races.

Council Directive 2000/43/EC

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, four-term U.S. Senator, ambassador, administration official, and academic

Whether or not there are [intelligence] differences between ethnic groups, is a well-researched field. However, I will not here reference the results of others, let alone speak my mind. Otherwise, I fear I would be pelted with eggs during lectures. Unfortunately, it is not possible to discuss this issue in a rational way.

Professor Detlef H. Rost, Der Spiegel, 06.05.2013 (my translation)

When I was a Revolutionary Marxist, we were all in favour of as much immigration as possible. It wasn’t because we liked immigrants, but because we didn’t like Britain.

Peter Hitchens, 31.03.2013, The Daily Mail

Michel Foucault’s approach reduces culture to a power-game, and scholarship to a kind of refereeing in the endless ‘struggle’ between oppressed and oppressing groups. The shift of emphasis from the content of an utterance to the power that speaks through it leads to a new kind of scholarship, which by-passes entirely questions of truth and rationality, and can even reject those questions as themselves ideological. The pragmatism of the late American philosopher Richard Rorty is of similar effect. It expressly set itself against the idea of objective truth, giving a variety of arguments for thinking that truth is a negotiable thing, that what matters in the end is which side you are on. If a doctrine is useful in the struggle that liberates your group, then you are entitled to dismiss the alternatives.

Roger Scruton, The great swindle, Aeon Magazine, 17.12.2012

Do not believe the confessions of tortured texts.

Abdal Hakim Murad, Contentions 11/92

This healthy instinct to poke fun at an unbalanced piety is the same instinct that makes us laugh at a one-armed man rowing a boat. He is not failing to make an effort, but he lacks balance. The unbalanced pietist, however, may not see the joke; and herein is a deadly threat.

Abdal Hakim Murad, Commentary on the Eleventh Contentions, (#86), page 151

Suicide bombing is an extreme way of shooting oneself in the foot.

Abdal Hakim Murad, Contentions 4/49

Meanwhile, individuals such as Stephen Jay Gould, who commit outright academic fraud in support of their ideological positions, do enormous damage to the credibility of their own camp.

Ron Unz, Race, IQ, and Wealth - What the facts tell us about a taboo subjec, The American Conservative, 18 July 2012

When the black Messiah (Nelson Mandela) dies, we'll teach the whites. We'll commit genocide against them: I hate whites.

South African police officer Juda Dagane, quoted by IOLnews

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Ray Bradbury

There is more than one way to burn a book.

Ray Bradbury

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

John Adams (US diplomat & politician, 1735 - 1826), 'Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials,' December 1770

Human nature is violent and predatory and can be held in check only by three forces, the Grace of God, the fear of the gallows and the pressure of a social tradition, subtly and unconsciously operating as a brake on human instinct.

T.E. Utley (1921 - 1988)

[It's] another step in a long-term goal of [his]: the peaceful, nonviolent disappearance of the white race.

Tom Hayden, congratulating his son on marrying a black woman, 27.08.2007

We need more speech, more liberty, not less. If this law passes, I shall break it as a point of principle. A hyperlink is not an act of approval, but an act of sourcing: It says to the reader I trust you to go to the source and make an informed judgment. In denying that freedom to the citizen, the state couldn't be more explicit in its contempt for you.

Mark Steyn commenting on a proposed law in Canada, The Criminalization of the Link, 10.05.2011

There is no such thing, at this stage of the world’s history in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dare write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. [...] The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.

John Swinton, chief editorial writer at The New York Times from 1860 to 1870 and an editorial writer for The New York Sun from 1875 to 1897

We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't know what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg and the EU's longest-serving head of government, quoted in The Economist, 23.09.2004

He is right to argue that immigration on the scale that Europe has experienced consitutues a risky experiment. He is right that we frequently talk about it in stupid and dishonest ways.

The Guardian, commenting on Christopher Caldwell's book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe

Try to repopulate Thailand with Scots and Slovaks and see whether what results is still Thailand.

Takuan Seiyo, Gates of Vienna, 12.12.2010

If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.

Winston Churchill

A West which has not yet understood that whites, in a world become too small for its inhabitants, are now a minority and that the proliferation of other races dooms our race, my race, irretrievably to extinction in the century to come, if we hold fast to our present moral principles.

Jean Raspail, 1982, The Camp of the Saints

Those who subscribe to the opinion that there are no human races are obviously ignorant of modern biology.

Ernst Mayr (2002)

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