The Joy of Curmudgeonry

If and insofar as the common man lacks virtue and self-control, and society lacks authorities, moral strictures, taboos and codes of behavio...

It is very odd that progressives — those who believe most strongly in the malleability of mankind and who thereupon push for unprecedented c...

From the easiness or difficulty of a problem, we are accustomed to assume that the thing about which the problem concerns itself must be cor...

It takes centuries of work by the sharpest and most curious minds to bring to light some particular of knowledge, whereupon it takes only mo...

It is becoming more common to hear a man claim that in no circumstance would he be an advocate of violence. In almost every case this is eit...

I am off to Germany tomorrow for a few days, where I intend to be very mindful of local traditions conducive to the happiness of the soul. I...

“Innocence is very far from finding as much protection as crime does.” [1] Thus noted La Rochefoucauld, who hadn’t even read The Guardian ....

“These young people [gang-yobs] need to be given value and more than that they need to experience economic equality”; [1] for only through ...

“Every philosophy which believes that the problem of existence is touched on, not to say solved, by a political event is a joke — and a pseu...

“Whenever I have occasion to classify the persons I meet into three classes, ‘good, medium, bad’, I use a needle mounted as a pricker, where...

Liverpool is to be European Capital of Culture in 2008. One must charitably suppose that it is culture in the anthropological sense.

“Nothing of human concern is really outside psychiatry.” [1] In this universal purblindness, much of human concern is lost from sight, fall...

Anthropology is the study whereby for every bad idea proposed by Western sophisticates, there can be found a tribe of savages testifying to ...

Evil is very far from banal — it is exciting, intoxicating, and brings spiritual weight and animation to even the most mundane of tasks. If ...

The modern liberal — let us say it: the smug bourgeois — is fit only for comfort and cowardice. All his principles, ideals, values, and aver...

If we wish to know all about the age in which we live, we must also read the writings of those who died before it began, who knew nothing ab...