Without an allegiance to beauty, art degenerates into a caricature of itself. It is beauty that animates aesthetic experience, making it so seductive; but aesthetic experience itself degenerates into a kind of fetish or idol if it is held up… — Roger Kimball Copy Share Image
“History,” Bagehot wrote, “is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of… — Roger Kimball Copy Share Image
Intelligence, like fire, is a power that is neither good nor bad in itself but rather takes its virtue, its moral coloring, from its… — Roger Kimball Copy Share Image
“The true democrat wishes to share the great works of culture with all who are able to appreciate them; the egalitarian, recognizing that genuine… — Roger Kimball Copy Share Image
“And let’s not forget “Dane-Geld”: It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation, To puff and look important and to say:… — Roger Kimball Copy Share Image
“(Some people regard the astonishing collapse of manners and civility in our society as a superficial event. They are wrong. The fate of decorum… — Roger Kimball Copy Share Image
“What is not possible is to combine the pursuit of pleasure and the enjoyment of comfort with the characteristic pleasures of a strong mind.… — Roger Kimball Copy Share Image
It is significant that the socialist mentality is usually also an atheistic mentality, where atheism is understood not so much as the disbelief in… — Roger Kimball Copy Share Image
What the historian Elie Kedourie called "the Chatham House Version" - that toxic amalgam of smugness, moral relativism, and cherished feelings of guilt about… — Roger Kimball Copy Share Image
We have all of us to some extent become inured to a culture where viciousness and depravity are simply taken for granted, like some… — Roger Kimball Copy Share Image
“It is often said that great works of art are “inexhaustible”—capable, as Stanley Olson put it, of “endless interpretation. But Lubin, the Charlotte C.… — Roger Kimball Copy Share Image
“The institutionalization of the radical ethos in the academy has brought with it not only an increasing politicization of the humanities, but also an… — Roger Kimball Copy Share Image
Our complexity is much more likely to lead us astray than any simplicity we may follow. — Roger Kimball Copy Share Image
