The Joy of Curmudgeonry

“Every man has also his moral backside which he does not show without need and which he keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers ...

While Voltaire was an exile in England, he observed that the peasants were “not afraid of increasing their stock of cattle, nor of tiling th...

“Nothing avails: one must go forward—step by step further into decadence” [1] . Nietzsche was never one to understate his case; but if one ...

There are some who — if it were not for exaggeration — would find it difficult to believe anything they were told.

There is so little trust amongst people nowadays that in despair we might exaggerate how little there is, which may have the consequence of ...

One often hears the call for a purer democracy, as if more of the disease would abate the symptoms; and of those symptoms one is meant not t...

“I do not believe in democracy,” wrote H.L. Mencken, “but I am perfectly willing to admit that it provides the only really amusing form of g...

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...