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Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Th...more

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Cheap booze is a false economy.

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Hardest of all, as one becomes older, is to accept that sapient remarks can be drawn from the most unwelcome or seemingly improbable sources, and that...more

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One must avoid snobbery and misanthropy. But one must also be unafraid to criticise those who reach for the lowest common denominator, and who sometim...more

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Try your hardest to combat atrophy and routine. To question The Obvious and the given is an essential element of the maxim 'de omnius dubitandum' [All...more

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The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.

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The forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book.

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It is truth, in the old saying, that is 'the daughter of time,' and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried...more

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Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don't say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you...more

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If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.

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But what [Orwell] illustrates, by his commitment to language as the partner of truth, is that 'views' do not really count; that it matters not what yo...more

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As he once wrote of Kipling, his own enduring influence can be measured by a number of terms and phrases—doublethink, thought police, 'Some animals ar...more

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Let's say that the consensus is that our species, being the higher primates, Homo Sapiens, has been on the planet for at least 100,000 years, maybe mo...more

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I'm very depressed how in this country you can be told "That's offensive" as though those two words constitute an argument.

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The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.