The Joy of Curmudgeonry

It is said that a Roman dux was accompanied in his triumphal procession by a slave whose task was to remind him by a constant whispering in...

It is true that popular election is in principle a competition open to all. No shyster or mountebank is precluded even on the grounds of de...

“Every school in England will get a specialist Holocaust teacher to promote tolerance and combat racism”, reports The Telegraph . [1] “[T]h...

“A party apparatchik . . . says the election means, ‘All of us have to give up our cynicism,’ and I think I might punch him in the face.” Ca...

“My vote mattered ,” says some poor fellow [1] , who seems to be giving delighted and succinct expression to the quite remarkably dim belief...

Against the odds I have striven to ignore the American presidential election, yet I have been lured from my mental cave by all those “eloque...

It is of great importance for the utopian to persuade himself and others that he is no utopian, that is to say, that his political and socia...

It may be banal or even simple-minded to say so, but I must confess that I am often in awe of the wondrous possibilities and effects of lang...

The most sophisticated demagogue is the one who publicly expresses the wish to engage in a rational debate with the people: even the clever ...

“The feeling that springs spontaneously from an unprejudiced judgment of the history of humanity is compassion for the contradictory qualiti...

science , n . the rigorous method or industry of gaining knowledge or funding.

Nothing so wonderful as Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog could be painted today in contemporary depiction without st...

Social justice in our lifetime is possible. All we need is a mob to lynch those who propose it.

In nobility lies the ability to admire without hope of imitation.

The flippant response of John Maynard Keynes to the criticism that his economic policies were guided by short-term considerations was to say...

News from Iceland: “Passing by the British Embassy just now I saw that security has been strengthened: one police-car standing outside and a...