The Joy of Curmudgeonry

“Shen Tao discarded knowledge, abandoned self, followed the inevitable, and was indifferent to things. Such were his principles. He said: ‘K...

“Democracy is a daring concept — a hope that we’ll be best governed if all of us participate in the act of government.” [1] It is another e...

bundling , n . A political party’s custom, hardly to be averted, of offering to an electorate a range of policies which must thereupon be ac...

“[F]aced with the facts at his disposal, Darwin reached the same conclusion as the Swedish Humanist Association: There’s probably no God.” [...

“Formerly I went frequently to Paris: I saw often many of those who were called ‘the philosophers’. It was particularly at Madame Geoffrin’s...

“The German nationalists . . . fought against the German patchwork of small states and wanted a unified home-market. Today for the same reas...

Some of our country’s “advanced”-level students of history have been complaining about a question which appeared in an examination: “How far...

“Now and then I believe I sense that the book of the world is becoming a little more legible.” [1] It happens to me sometimes: in deepest th...

Not mere apes: modernists . Mere apes might on occasion fling their own excrement, but they never claim it to be some form of new art.

To confidence is owed half the success of becoming an intellectual; and to intellect is owed less than half.

To depict this age faithfully is an aesthetic sin, and I am therefore often reluctant to sully the page with any unsightly instances of it. ...

For any taurocoprologist, the appearance of each issue of the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies is an exciting event. For me, ho...

“I guess you are a B.N.P supporter but you have conceded that we Muslims are allies in the fight against the ultra-left anti-family fanatics...

“It seemed very natural to think, that the Treatise of human nature required an author, and a very ingenious one too; but now we learn, tha...

In reply to a commenter at Comment is Free , who wrote of the interests of the various races and peoples in Britain, and of the officially-d...

“In Parliaments, Men wrangle in behalf of Liberty, that do as little care for it, as they deserve it.” George Savile, Marquis of Halifax,...