Roger Kimball Quotes

• We have all of us to some extent become inured to a culture where viciousness and depravity are simply taken for granted, like some hideous wallpaper we have lived with for years.

  Roger Kimball

  Taken, Years, Culture

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• 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 the socialist sets out to abolish failure, traditional religion is worse than _de trop_: it is an impediment to perfection.

  Roger Kimball

  Attitude, Practice, Perfection

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

  Roger Kimball

  Fire, Intelligence, Moral

  Roger Kimball (2002). “Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse”, Ivan R Dee

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

  Roger Kimball

  Data, Age, Information

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• What the historian Elie Kedourie called "the Chatham House Version" - that toxic amalgam of smugness, moral relativism, and cherished feelings of guilt about the achievements of Western civilization - everywhere nurtured the catechism of established opinion.

  Roger Kimball

  Civilization, House, Achievement

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

  Roger Kimball

  Simplicity, May, Complexity

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• 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 as an end in itself, untested by the rest of life.

  Roger Kimball

  Beauty, Art, Idols

  Roger Kimball (2000). “Experiments Against Reality: The Fate of Culture in the Postmodern Age”, Ivan R Dee

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