The Joy of Curmudgeonry

“It is now found that the thoughts and moods that you have can affect how water crystallizes.” [1] Indeed the ice-cubes in my freezer are t...

“Men, ’tis true, are always much inclin’d to prefer present interest to distant and remote; nor is it easy for them to resist the temptation...

The status of poetry has changed much over the ages, from its high rank of old as divinely-inspired speech and a repository of wisdom, to it...

“When once incomprehensibility of speech was introduced by Fichte and the semblance of profundity was put in place of thought, the seeds wer...

“There is no tyranny so hateful as a vulgar and anonymous tyranny. It is all-permeating, all-thwarting; it blasts every budding novelty and ...

Apparently the chaps who made Salman Rushdie a Sir had not taken into consideration the touchiness of the Islamic world, an oversight that h...

At times the world must seem to the ideologue to be full of the most oblique and inexpedient occurrences requiring the most oblique and expe...

“According to the elitist values of the monarchical system, the most stupid, immoral royal is more fit to be head of state than the wisest, ...

There is no clearer sign of a widespread blight in culture than that language, a vital organ of intellectual and cultural life, is degraded....

The sight of people competing to be victims seems to be odd and against the order of things until one considers that they are in fact compet...

The defenders of a dying creed often hasten its death by the manner in which they choose to defend it—by a solicitous desire not to offend i...

“Be more stupid and you will feel better” — such was Professor Immermann’s prescription for the ailments of his most brilliant patient, Frie...

One becomes so accustomed to the evasiveness and dishonesty of politicians that one immediately thinks something is amiss when one of them g...

No explanation can be found for why a fundament of the world exists; for by definition it is something which has no worldly reason for its b...

“They are quite anxious. They have enjoyed the prosperity, the happiness, under the kings. This is an irreversible process our king has init...

We can hardly imagine what fools we look to posterity, and in what present and prepossessing absurdities we engage, until we catch a glimpse...