Obesity is the result of a loss of self-control. Indeed, loss of self-control might be said to be … - Theodore Dalrymple

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When Grandma Mazur is talking about the reason for the improved play of her 91-year-old bowling teammate, she said: "She's doing better now that we got her the longer tubing to her oxygen tank.

Theodore Dalrymple

Obesity is the result of a loss of self-control. Indeed, loss of self-control might be said to be the defining social (or anti-social) characteristic of our age: public drunkenness, excessive gambling, promiscuity and common-or-garden rudeness are all examples of our collective loss of self-control.

Age, Drunkenness, Gambling, Garden, Loss, Said

Same Author Quotes

The idea that man is a tabula rasa, or Mao's sheet of blank paper upon which the most beautiful characters can be written, is an old one with disastrous implications. I do not think though that the cults you mention could survive honest thought about human nature.

Beautiful, Character, Mention, Thinking, Though, Written

The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one's whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexities of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved.

Begins, Enslaved, Human, Ideas, Law, Men

Life is a biography, not a series of disconnected moments, more or less pleasurable but increasingly tedious and unsatisfying unless one imposes a purposive pattern upon them.

Biographies, Biography, Life, Life Is, Patterns, Pleasurable

Orders can be benign or malign, but the habit of obeying them can become ingrained.

Benign, Habit, Ingrained, Obeying, Order

When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.

Liars, Lying, People, Standing, Way, Worse