William Gayley Simpson

Crazy Pat Robertson of the “700 Club” and the Christian Broadcasting Network, and friend by Revilo P. Oliver THERE IS a great value in books by men who, like Tolkien’s diminutive hero, have “been there and back.” One of the most potent antidotes to modern superstitions…

Keep this passage in mind when you get doxxed… “Dare only to believe in thyself — in thyself and in thine inward parts! He who doth not believe in himself always lieth! What saith thy Conscience? — ‘Thou shalt become what thou art.’” But over and over again Nietzsche stressed the difficulty of “finding…

Man sleeps in the forest. When he awakens and realizes his power, then order is reconstituted. — Junger OUR SUPREME NEED is for a new religion, a religion that is our own, consonant with all the best in our past, equal to all the exigencies of our present. But I am convinced that no amount of negative…

by William Gayley Simpson WE TURN now to study the claims of the French revolutionists. These claims they undertook so to establish on abstract, innate, imprescriptible right that the zealot minds that follow them are rendered nearly impervious to evidence that their theories have failed in practice…

by William Gayley Simpson THERE ARE TWO items in the record that might give the critic pause. One of these is the success of the United States. The other is French Revolutionary theory, which for the first time undertook to place its claims above the reach of any record and to found them on natural, inborn,…

by William Gayley Simpson LET US BEGIN by looking at democracy’s record. The examples most commonly and confidently adduced are those of ancient Greece, and modern England, France, and the United States. Yet the record need not detain us very long. In the case of Greece, it may be questioned whether…

by William Gayley Simpson IT SHOULD BE clear that the primary object to be sought by every healthy society and to be conserved by every sound and responsible government is something very different from the materialistic absorption in raising the standard of living of the masses. To be sure, the welfare…

by William Gayley Simpson ONE MAY well doubt whether there is anything I can add concerning the respective merits of democracy and aristocracy that has not already been said by Aristotle, Plato, and Confucius — by Lecky, Arnold, Stephen, Maine, Carlyle, Ruskin, Burke, and Nietzsche; by Mairet, Cram,…

by William Gayley Simpson Historically speaking, I believe there was no nation that could ever subsist on Democracy. This lesson will have to be learned under penalties. England will either have to learn it, or England will cease to exist among nations. (Thomas Carlyle) There were three principles…

by Stephen Leacock Eliot WILLIAM GAYLEY Simpson is an interesting case — one of those men who do an about-face in life in both belief and action. He lived an astoundingly long active political and literary life, from the 1910s through the 1980s. His book, Which Way, Western Man?, is the story of…