The Joy of Curmudgeonry

George Monbiot calls for a world-government with direct popular representation. For a moment, even he is aware of the problem that such a sy...

“Many years ago I had a few years of seeing ‘social science’ data — and social scientists — close up. That’s when I realised that, in that w...

“Iceland and Norway will sign a declaration of co-operation on the subject of defence and security at a meeting of the countries’ foreign mi...

Given the calibre of modern celebrities, it is best not to mention their names without sober purpose, lest one wantonly add — even in the sl...

Perhaps there is also a genetic predisposition to seek the excuses for one’s behaviour in genetic predisposition.

“[A]nyone who wants to understand piety would do better to read back-numbers of the New Left Review than the Church Times .” ..... George W...

There is a luxuriantly principled kind of thoughtlessness whereby one can decry things in the lowest terms without caring to find out whethe...

“I never knew that [in the seventeenth century] ‘Mount Pleasant’, near Gray’s Inn, was actually a bitterly ironic name for a huge man-made h...

“It was a saying of [Anacharsis] that the vine bore three kinds of grapes: the first of pleasure, the next of intoxication, and the third of...

Rather than simply shirk one’s duty, it appears much more decent to make a principle out of one’s disinclination to perform it.

It is less a tragedy that a man must choose between evils than that the fire of his enthusiasm is stoked by the choice.

“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 ...