Fewtril no.285

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

Fewtril no.284

On the dusty and featureless plain of his soul, it is easy for the latter-day man to lose all sense of perspective and direction.

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 no.282

Religion is the rule-governed search for that which one lacks. Reason, therefore, stands as the religion of the moderns.

Fewtril no.281

A feeling of moral superiority is much too great a pleasure for the morally wretched to forbear. What is this — a cynical word against moral superiority? No: a truthful word against pleasure-seeking wretchedness.

Fewtril no.280

The more primitive, the more real — this is the principle of a reductionistic metaphysics which informs everything from art to science. Perhaps one day we shall become too real to express it.

Fewtril no.279

Logical positivism was more scorn than logical commitment. That might explain its lingering appeal despite its self-refutation.

Fewtril no.278

Whenever men of the West gather to ask why it has fallen, one is sure to get another glimpse of the answer.

Fewtril no.277

It is no easy task to become virtuous, which is why in our age it is regarded as a vicious burden.

Fewtril no.276

It is a happy thing for the utilitarians that immeasurable harm cannot be reckoned by the felicific calculus.

Fewtril No.275

It has been said that disgust arises in man from the consciousness of those things which remind him of his beasthood. That must explain my visceral reaction to libertarians.

Fewtril no.275

The common man is never so clever as the politician says and never so stupid as the politician believes.

Fewtril no.274

There has been raised a horde of men, if so honorific a title may still be retained for them, who cry out “sky-fairy!” whenever they hear the word “God”, rather as Ivan Pavlov’s dogs salivated whenever they heard bells and whistles, albeit with a crucial difference: the dogs could not be inculcated to fancy that in their mindless reflexes they were on the side of reason.

Fewtril no.273

Some liberals say that, in order to defend the West, we must defend “western values”, by which they mean “liberal values”, by which I understand those newly-invented values which have done more than any other to dissolve the West. It is like taking health-tips from disease-germs.

Fewtril no.272

It is funny when ministers and parliamentarians make a promise of treating the voting public like grown-ups and responsible adults; it is just the kind of language to use when one wishes to flatter children and adolescents.

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 no.270

The bellwether-intelligentsia are always one step ahead of the herd in the run of ideas, but are usually outpaced and trampled down in the realisation of their consequences.

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.268

To confidence is owed half the success of becoming an intellectual; and to intellect is owed less than half.

Fewtril no.267

Iconoclasm is for the philistine a sacred idol never to be broken.