At a recent literary festival it was not enough for those who disagreed with a fellow speaker merely to protest her words and sentiments. Rather, they assaulted patrons and filled the air with threats and menaces while the police, as usual, did nothing. Free speech, it seems, is now a public nuisance

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Isaac Deutscher is fading into memory, his name recognised chiefly those who have made a study of the Soviet Union's apologists and enablers. For the unfamiliar, he was one of those slippery sorts who could not quite decide if mass murder in the right hands serves the interests of humanity

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Is the world really dividing into two, as fashionable economist Thomas Piketty asserts? Of course, you can always divide the world into two: those, for example, who divide it into two and those who don’t. The question is one of the nature of reality. Is the world composed of the one or the many?

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The best-informed are not necessarily the wisest. Very often, indeed, they have proved the most foolish. There is a certain kind of stupidity associated with erudition that gives itself airs, which takes itself seriously and is condescending to mere common sense

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It was long the French ambition to be rid of dangerous and predatory wolves, but more recently the creatures have enjoyed a better press. Somehow it seeped into public consciousness that, contrary to all evidence and experience,  wolves are darling creatures to be welcomed and indulged

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The only way to eliminate hypocrisy from the human repertoire is to have no standards at all, since practically no one, except for saints, lives up to the ideals he proclaims. A society without hypocrisy, in which all were saints, would be decidedly uninteresting

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Why did I purchase Reginald Ellery’s 'Psychiatric Aspects of Modern Warfare'? Well, I came across him in the context of the Ern Malley affair, in which he testified as an expert witness. But more than that, he has value as an example of an intellectual whose mind changes,  never the certainty of his opinions

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Many people, when they know a subject really well, find newspaper accounts of it misleading or inaccurate, even as to the most elementary facts. And yet the strange thing is that it does not discourage them from continuing to read newspapers and even believe them

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I have heard it said that snobbery is only a minor fault, but the truth is that it breeds a resentment that causes people to seek revenge even at great personal cost to themselves. Resentment soon turns to paranoia, with every act, every opinion or taste other than one’s own taken as a slight

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Lovers of humanity in general don’t seem to be very happy in themselves. How can they be, from the strictly ethical point of view, with so much misery to commiserate? “Now that we talk of dying,” asked Eliot, “should I have the right to smile?”

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