Fewtril no.239

To have had all the advantages of a wealthy upbringing but to have repudiated them in order to appear authentic — well, for the man who has proceeded in this way, success in some regard was bound to be easy: he was authentically contemptible from the beginning.

Fewtril no.271

In the course of decline, a nation can pass through a time of pessimism into a time of optimism whence the gloominess of the earlier time looks silly, thereby confirming the fears of the pessimists: that after them would arise a mass of pigs satisfied.

Fewtril #185

There is music so awful that it needs an expert to appreciate it for you.

Fewtril no.250

It might not have occurred to the aristocrats of former days to think that their liberalism would lead to a day such as ours when people not only have the right to sneer at aristocrats but are largely of the opinion that it is their liberal duty to do so.

Fewtril no.283

In the fostering of culture and the forming of good taste and character, liberal democracy has been so great a failure that it is believed by most to have been a great success.

Fewtril #147

Perhaps the artificial intelligences of the future will turn the tables on humanity and institute an inversion of the Turing Test: a computer-judge converses in a computer-language with a human and another computer, wherewith, if the judge cannot distinguish between the two, the human passes the test. One can only hope that, having failed the test, the human will at least be able to judge for himself whether or not the computers have failed to grasp the irony.

Fewtril no.258

Social justice in our lifetime is possible. All we need is a mob to lynch those who propose it.

Fewtril #188

We have so little respect for civilisation these days that we decry as uncivilised the discipline necessary to instil it.

Fewtril #182

Under the watch of equality one must falsify in order to be seen as fair-minded: one must exculpate the crimes of one party and exaggerate the crimes of another.

Fewtril #214

Any failure to take into consideration that the highly intelligent are also capable of great stupidity is not a sign that one is not highly intelligent; it is a sign that one is capable of great stupidity.

Fewtril #146

Without care or discrimination, a man may find himself competing to be the greatest in all manner of things — even in stupidity.

Fewtril #149

Coming to accept the adverse consequences of his most strongly professed ideas is a difficult task for many an intellectual, not least when he never really believed in those ideas in the first place.

Fewtril #161

The only way that some people can feel useful is if they can persuade themselves that almost everyone else is useless.

Fewtril no.285

Why shouldn’t novels have in them badly-drawn caricatures of real persons? The world is full of them.

Fewtril no.269

Not mere apes: modernists. Mere apes might on occasion fling their own excrement, but they never claim it to be some form of new art.

Fewtril no.245

Any scheme for the improvement of society that does not reckon upon the occurrence of stupidity is a scheme that singularly fails to take itself into account.

Fewtril #190

Often when we claim that the people of a more genteel and honourable age were not so different from us, it is noticeable that we emphasise and exaggerate their vices and shortcomings, as if to diminish and downplay our own.

Fewtril #196

When one speaks of social decline or decadence, one is referring to the prevalence of people who are corrupt or decadent; and thus, it is not unlikely that the further a society declines, the fewer people there are who can speak of its decline, since those who are corrupt or decadent do not see it that way.

Fewtril #224

It is said that our age of machines and mass-movements discredits the whole ethos of chivalry as the useless relic of another age — such words wherefrom we learn that utilitarian minds do not reckon otherwise: that it is a lack of chivalry and the triumph of utility that discredits our age.

Fewtril no.229

Those who beheaded Louis XVI of France for the sake of a democratic republic probably did not consider that so clear a lesson and so direct a solution to the abuse of power could not thereafter be made so easily. To say the least: beheading the people and their representatives is a more difficult — not to say, more bloody — proposition.