The Joy of Curmudgeonry

In consideration of the recent “anti-war” protests in Washington, Christopher Hitchens decries the involvement of militant leftist groups t...

If the weight of intellectual advocacy were taken into account, the scales of justice would come down on the side of tyranny.

That the modern “non-judgmental” and “tolerating” species of man spends much of his time in raging denunciation of views that might upset hi...

If you have ever awoken in the morning and thought, “in order to be an active subject, I have to get rid of — and transpose onto the other ...

One of the greatest wonders of the world is that a man can lie to himself and get away with it.

“The public had been forced to see [in Kant] that what is obscure is not always without meaning; what was senseless and without meaning at o...

It should gladden our hearts and behope us all that blackguards can put aside their differences long enough to identify their shared blackgu...

A modern totalitarian rarely makes so crude an Orwellian statement as “freedom is slavery”. His is a beclouded and garrulous soul, and he wo...

In explaining the vast improbability of our existence, we have tended to settle on one of two unprovable propositions: either that this is o...

“There’ll always be an England”, sang some short-sighted fellow, and though he may have reckoned with foreign nations seeking its destructio...

It is hard to estimate just how much perfidy, cowardice and moral decrepitude is hidden in pacifism. If we were to take into consideration o...

The superiority of ignoramuses in view of the absurd beliefs of their ignorant forebears is such that they are able to ask: “How could they ...

A scholar who has come to rue the loneliness that is marked by the rift between his scholarship and the indifference of the people thereto i...

He who would like the simple truth of a matter to be shrouded hits upon the simple trick of describing as simple-minded those who utter it.

One ought to consider whether the conditions necessary for decent society are too delicate to survive the protestations of the people.

I should not like to sully these pages with mention of so lowly a creature as Julie Burchill, whose name time will obliterate, leaving no mo...