The Joy of Curmudgeonry

When the expert seeks to dissociate himself from the layman, he is often tempted into making the sort of claims from which every layman ough...

Little can be made of a man who habitually lies, cheats, inveigles, and corrupts, unless he has the support and encouragement of others, in ...

Sometimes it seems that public debate in this land is worthy of attention only because it is the arena in which charlatans and demagogues mi...

Our failings which are known to others are often unknown to ourselves; for we are wont to conceal those that are known to us, but to adverti...

“Each and every time I find myself sitting on a plane, somewhere between a European city and Delhi or Bombay, I always experience that same ...

“If you’re not careful, I shall be offended, and then you’ll be sorry.” Such is the threat of the crutch-rattler, usurper of pathos, exploit...

Every journalist ought to struggle against that inclination of his to call brave those efforts of which he approves; yet typically it seems ...

“Most teachers of a faith defend their propositions, not because they are convinced of their truth, but because they have once asserted thei...

George F. Will tells a story of how Isaac Deutscher, biographer and acolyte of Leon Trotsky, once opined amidst the tea, banter, and hot sic...

If some unearthly being were to list the most common symptoms of madness on earth, happen it would find them mostly unnamed by earthlings, e...

“I have no embarrassment at all. No shame” , says Bono [1], which is just as well, for shame is one of those things that marks us out from b...

If a mark could be set at that level down to which the demotic politician is willing to stoop, it would most likely be set no higher than at...

“Evil is something immanent to truth” [1]. Such is the opinion of Alain Badiou, standard-issue French windbag and Marxian buffoon. ........

“We oppose all immigration laws” [1], says the Revolutionary Communist Group , though one may fairly suppose it has a different view on emi...

No professional doom-foreteller has yet been so bold or so brave as to utter what is perhaps the worst of his forebodings: that he will awak...

Homo-sectual . – n. A person whose “gayness (or homosexuality) is deeply interwoven with personal experiences and understandings of relig...