The Joy of Curmudgeonry

“More and more individuals, owing to their bloodless indolence, will aspire to be nothing at all—in order to become the public.” Søren Kierk...

Helvetica is rightly deemed the typeface that best typifies modernism: it is bland and functional. Of its aesthetic qualities, others say ot...

History is no keen judge: the silliest affairs can become the profoundest events, and the weakest ideas the strongest currents.

It is a cold head that counts upon opportunities to persuade itself and others that it is attached to a warm heart.

Those who beheaded Louis XVI of France for the sake of a democratic republic probably did not consider that so clear a lesson and so direct ...

I’ll never fit in; I have trouble faking outrage.

There is a terrible lot of straw men walking around — so why not attack them?

Some might say we are blessed by political moralism, in that for every matter about which one might feel guilty, there are a thousand uncons...

The madman’s flight from reality is dramatic compared to what is normal: a steady and sane retreat — most cunningly into a narrow study of s...

Audism is “the hearing way of dominating, restructuring, and exercising authority over the deaf community” [1] and is “the most dramatic fo...

“[I]nclusive school programming may allow children to perceive . . . reindeer such as Rudolph as a reindeer, not as a ‘red-nosed reindeer’.”...

Apartheid — let us give thanks for a word as holy as it is useful in the defamation of all that is private, selective, and independent! For...

I heard a BBC reporter call the British Council “scrupulously non-political”, a phrase which I must suppose has the sense of: prevailing lef...

It is said that our age of machines and mass-movements discredits the whole ethos of chivalry as the useless relic of another age — such wo...

Art, we are told, must be accessible to all, as if it must serve the purpose and attain the status of a public convenience.

Those who deplore the stance of us-and-them adopt it towards those who laud it.