How do you add CSS with Javascript?

You can also do this using DOM Level 2 CSS interfaces (MDN):

var sheet = window.document.styleSheets[0];
sheet.insertRule('strong { color: red; }', sheet.cssRules.length);

...on all but (naturally) IE8 and prior, which uses its own marginally-different wording:

sheet.addRule('strong', 'color: red;', -1);

There is a theoretical advantage in this compared to the createElement-set-innerHTML method, in that you don't have to worry about putting special HTML characters in the innerHTML, but in practice style elements are CDATA in legacy HTML, and ‘<’ and ‘&’ are rarely used in stylesheets anyway.

You do need a stylesheet in place before you can started appending to it like this. That can be any existing active stylesheet: external, embedded or empty, it doesn't matter. If there isn't one, the only standard way to create it at the moment is with createElement.

The simple-and-direct approach is to create and add a new style node to the document.

// Your CSS as text
var styles = `
    .qwebirc-qui .ircwindow div { 
        font-family: Georgia,Cambria,"Times New Roman",Times,serif;
        margin: 26px auto 0 auto;
        max-width: 650px;
    }
    .qwebirc-qui .lines {
        font-size: 18px;
        line-height: 1.58;
        letter-spacing: -.004em;
    }
    
    .qwebirc-qui .nicklist a {
        margin: 6px;
    }
`

var styleSheet = document.createElement("style")
styleSheet.innerText = styles
document.head.appendChild(styleSheet)

The solution by Ben Blank wouldn't work in IE8 for me.

However this did work in IE8

function addCss(cssCode) {
var styleElement = document.createElement("style");
  styleElement.type = "text/css";
  if (styleElement.styleSheet) {
    styleElement.styleSheet.cssText = cssCode;
  } else {
    styleElement.appendChild(document.createTextNode(cssCode));
  }
  document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(styleElement);
}

Shortest One Liner

// One liner function:
const addCSS = css => document.head.appendChild(document.createElement("style")).innerHTML=css;

// Usage: 
addCSS("body{ background:red; }")