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: “Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you. We will therefore pay you cash to go away.” And that is called paying the Dane-geld; But we’ve proved it again… — Roger Kimball Copy Share
“(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 God as the hatred of God˜an attitude as precarious logically as it has been destructive in practice. There is an important sense in which religion as traditionally understood reconciles humanity to imperfection and to failure. Since… — Roger Kimball Copy Share
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
