Roger Kimball

“History,” Bagehot wrote, “is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great…

— Roger Kimball

Intelligence, like fire, is a power that is neither good nor bad in itself but rather takes its virtue, its moral coloring,…

— Roger Kimball

“The true democrat wishes to share the great works of culture with all who are able to appreciate them; the egalitarian, recognizing…

— Roger Kimball

“And let’s not forget “Dane-Geld”: It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation, To puff and look important and…

— Roger Kimball

“(Some people regard the astonishing collapse of manners and civility in our society as a superficial event. They are wrong. The fate…

— Roger Kimball

“What is not possible is to combine the pursuit of pleasure and the enjoyment of comfort with the characteristic pleasures of a…

— Roger Kimball

It is significant that the socialist mentality is usually also an atheistic mentality, where atheism is understood not so much as the…

— Roger Kimball

What the historian Elie Kedourie called "the Chatham House Version" - that toxic amalgam of smugness, moral relativism, and cherished feelings of…

— Roger Kimball

We have all of us to some extent become inured to a culture where viciousness and depravity are simply taken for granted,…

— Roger Kimball

“It is often said that great works of art are “inexhaustible”—capable, as Stanley Olson put it, of “endless interpretation. But Lubin, the…

— Roger Kimball

“The institutionalization of the radical ethos in the academy has brought with it not only an increasing politicization of the humanities, but…

— Roger Kimball

Our complexity is much more likely to lead us astray than any simplicity we may follow.

— Roger Kimball

“Beauty is a fragile and vulnerable quality, and moreover one that is difficult to achieve; ugliness, by contrast, is unbreakable and invulnerable,…

— Roger Kimball

Without an allegiance to beauty, art degenerates into a caricature of itself. It is beauty that animates aesthetic experience, making it so…

— Roger Kimball

“Civilization is an achievement not a gift; it is always besieged, must constantly be defended, and once lost, is immeasurably difficult to…

— Roger Kimball

“Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing…

— Roger Kimball

Welcome to the information age. Data, data, everywhere, but no one knows a thing.

— Roger Kimball