The Joy of Curmudgeonry

Insofar as true nobility of purpose is lacking, we ought to be duly thankful even for mean-spiritedness and strife; for much of the good don...

The good citizen of the bureaucratic state is one who has nothing beyond scrutiny, an open book whose pages can be turned and read at will b...

The ease with which moral cowards denounce the committing of lesser evils is a grotesque parody of the difficulty with which the brave have ...

I What Kuhn, Derrida, and I believe is that it is pointless to ask whether there really are mountains or whether it is merely convenient for...

The stupidity of animals amuses us — such as a dog chasing its tail. Against such behaviour, we can cite examples of reflective humanity — s...

I have heard people criticised, abused, traduced, mocked, upbraided, annoyed, and defamed — but rarely demonised ; and yet there is much tal...

The word “God” holds more power now than it has held in many past ages — sometimes its mere utterance is enough to clear a room.

Power to the people does not translate into freedom for the person; and one is, after all, a person and not a people. How is it that anyone ...

Every movement must declare itself to be good if it is to become powerful, and every movement that becomes powerful attracts the bad who mus...

Many would find it easier to live a life of abstinence than of moderation; happily for such persons, there is an even easier extreme: a life...

Many cynical observations of human behaviour may be true — but a widespread acknowledgment of their truth might render human behaviour so ba...

Those who feel the vulnerability of their pretended tastes and convictions are acutely sensitive not only to criticism but also to a lack of...

A wonderful thing is that the practical side of man always somehow emerges, even if it might mean a logical inconsistency with a set of beli...

I’ve always fancied that if one is to draw conclusions from history, one ought at least to make the effort to get the very basics right. Wha...

The question of climate-change is a very complex one for the layman. For it is not merely the question of whether global or regional climate...

For the same reason that it was once said that mankind could not hear the music of the spheres — because it was a constant to which he had g...