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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.

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

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

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

Roger Kimball
Data, Age, Information

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

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

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

Roger Kimball
Simplicity, May, Complexity

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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