The Joy of Curmudgeonry

The popular success of liberalism is owed perhaps to its securing the right of every man to be indifferent and shamelessly vulgar — such of ...

“The chattiness of women has been a thousand times besmirked, jested, and even derided; may it not also be defended? One must be able to fin...

Any scheme for the improvement of society that does not reckon upon the occurrence of stupidity is a scheme that singularly fails to take it...

Even incredulity becomes a creed.

“[A]n Absolute Government founded on Corruption , without an Appearance of Liberty , is better than such a Government, where some outward ...

The now largely forgotten J.C. Friedrich Schulz was a prolific and popular writer of the late Enlightenment in Germany. In December 1790, he...

It should come as a surprise to no one by now to learn that one of the greatest storms of barbarism the world has ever seen, in which much o...

“I got entangled in my own data, and my conclusion directly contradicts the original idea from which I start. Starting from unlimited freedo...

The man who dismisses intuition as a pre-scientific folk-myth is just the sort of stout, deliberative, no-nonsense chap to have by one’s sid...

The conceit of some journalists is so rich, and their conceptions so poor, that when they advocate a meritocracy, they imagine a state of af...

It is a lazy if not imperious habit of mind to declare irrational those who do not work towards one’s own ends.

Many call it the exercise of the intellect; but in ear-shot and sight of all their high-flown talk, of their verbosity that goes nowhere, of...

Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager, last of the conspirators in the plot to assassinate Hitler in July 1944, has died. [1] To Ernst Jünger, wr...

Great god of sleep, since it must be, That we must give some hours to thee, Invade me not while the free bowl Glows in my cheeks, and warms ...

It has always been a maxim of strategy — not to say, of commonsense — to have a good understanding of what the enemy is thinking, and, most ...

To have had all the advantages of a wealthy upbringing but to have repudiated them in order to appear authentic — well, for the man who has ...