The Joy of Curmudgeonry

It is to be suspected that we have some very wonderful and complex theories because there are no prizes for stating the obvious.

“Sure, I know this isn’t the time for a gender war; I know I should be concentrating on the class war.” (Zoe Williams, “ The old school lie ...

Only when one has detached oneself through ideological rectitude from the factual premises of the world can one then proceed with faultless ...

Those ministers of the State who believe that social order can arise from rational planning flatter themselves in regard to their powers of ...

For every thinker who has hit the nail on the head, there are a hundred blackguards to say that he missed; and amongst them there are still ...

The foolish and the wise may share many beliefs; for what is evidently true may be known to both; but many a fool, in a effort to distance h...

“Our imperial road signs . . . contradict the image – and the reality – of our country as a modern, multicultural, dynamic place where the p...

There are things against which a teacher might usefully warn his students, so that they might avoid some common pitfalls of thought and ther...

Few things bear the mark of this age more boldly than that one must denounce in the strongest terms and without care for temperance those un...

A man might go carefully in attacking an idea from which he is averse, not because he is fair-minded and temperate, but because the idea sha...

In the comic play of history, the people cry out for liberty, and revel when they are set free from the authority that set them to their vir...

How wonderful it is that liberalism has progressed so far as to find only compassionate understanding for the barbarism of its enemies and c...

An idiot is heard to say to another: “I think you are a moral man; I mean, you are not judgmental”. Cabbages are not judgmental, though they...

To err on the side of betrayal is a strategy that has no merit but its simplicity, which single quality accounts partly for its success in t...

In our bureau-democracy, it is unlikely that there is much conscious effort on the part of the bureaucratic functionaries to bring about a t...

It takes a little courage to do the right thing in defiance of public opinion. Our politicians tend to berate one another for defying public...