The Joy of Curmudgeonry

It is all very well to cite freedom of action as a crucial cause of crime, though one might very well cite the bath-water as a crucial cause...

It takes only the suspicion that someone somewhere is making a fool of him for the conspiracy theorist to make an utter fool of himself, and...

So often the phrase let’s explore the issues surrounding this is a fair-sounding substitute for let’s miss the point .

Towards those things about which we couldn’t care one way or another, we may take the opportunity to display a most magnanimous tolerance, t...

The writer of arcane and impenetrable prose may flatter the pretensions of his readers by letting it be known that he who discerns therein a...

“It is possible to stroke someone’s cheek in such a way that a third party feels as though he has had his face slapped.” [“Es ist möglich je...

The shrewder of our politicians know that they can get away with almost anything, because they know only too well what they make it a point ...

On the question of external realities, whether a man will profess to find more persuasion in an argument for universal scepticism than in a ...

I often get the feeling that many of those laymen who profess to be Darwinists have hardly the foggiest understanding of the theory of evolu...

Universal harmony, the perfection of man, and the eradication of evil from the world;—such were the woolly hopes of that first great outbrea...

“Make hay while the sun shines”—or, as our contemporaries would have it, defame the excellence of your rivals while the spirit of equality r...

One might take it as a cause for worry that our society has found more ways of saying nothing is true than it has of saying honesty is the...

No fair-minded man could damn me for suspecting that Professor Baudrillard finds it impossible to say something banal when he has the narro...

Upon a glimpse of his true nature, the ideologue may begin to feel a pang of shame, and no sooner has he felt it than he seeks to allay it w...

We sometimes hear the self-styled progressives argue that we ought to withdraw our support from and let perish those things whose existence ...

In the opinion of the late philosophaster of science Paul Feyerabend, “our entire universe . . . is an artifact constructed by generations ...