Paul Johnson Quotes & Sayings

At Tulsa, Oklahoma, on 30 May 1921, fifty whites and two hundred blacks were murdered. — Paul Johnson

Courage is the essential element in any great public man or woman. — Paul Johnson

Indeed, the study of universities and the great men and women who have attended them leads me to think that the best of these schools are characterized not so much by what they teach and how they teach it but by the extent they provide opportunities and encouragement for students to teach themselves. — Paul Johnson

In America, however, the Bolshevik scare effectively ended the policy of unrestricted immigration which had been the salvation of east European Jewry in the period 1881-1914, and which had enabled the great American Jewry to come into existence. — Paul Johnson

The planet Earth, though not threatened with destruction by man-made global warming, is by no means indestructible. There are many unpredictable events within our solar system, and still more outside it, that could make Earth uninhabitable by humans. — Paul Johnson

It takes less than a decade for today's luxury to become a universal necessity. — Paul Johnson

One of the marvelous things about Churchill is that whatever he was doing, whether fighting or arguing or despairing or bouncing about full of energy, jokes are never far away. — Paul Johnson

I've been having an affair, but I still believe in family values. — Paul Johnson

If anti-Semitism is a variety of racism, it is a most peculiar variety, with many unique characteristics. In my view as a historian, it is so peculiar that it deserves to be placed in a quite different category. I would call it an intellectual disease, a disease of the mind, extremely infectious and massively destructive. — Paul Johnson

The idea of the individual had always, of course, been present in Mosaic religion, since it was inherent in the belief that each man and woman was created in God's image. It had been powerfully reinforced by the sayings of Isaiah. With Ezekiel it became paramount, and thereafter individual accountability became of the very essence of the Jewish religion. — Paul Johnson

Indeed, there are recurrent hints in the Bible that the Israelites had feelings of guilt about taking the Canaanites' land,147 a curious adumbration of Israeli twinges about homeless Palestinian Arabs in the late twentieth century. The Israelites, however, hid any remorse in the belief that the conquest was a pious act: it is 'because of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord is driving them out before you'. — Paul Johnson

The Second World War took place not so much because no one won the First, but because the Versailles Treaty did not acknowledge this truth. — Paul Johnson

Next to courage, willpower is the most important thing in politics. — Paul Johnson

Long periods of recession, which tend to be self-perpetuating, are usually ended by war, or by preparations for it. — Paul Johnson

The richness and variety, and indeed the advance, of our culture depend upon the continuation of this conflict [between conservatives and radicals], which is deeply rooted in human nature. — Paul Johnson

Mr. Obama would be a disheartening president even during a super boom, with his grim demeanor and empty rhetoric, as well as his obvious hatred of business bravado. — Paul Johnson

As a child I found railroad stations exciting, mysterious, and even beautiful, as indeed they often were. — Paul Johnson

Euphemism is a human device to conceal the horrors of reality. — Paul Johnson

It is one of the many ironies of this period that, at a time when the intelligentsia were excoriating Mellon for tax-evasion, and contrasting the smooth-running Soviet planned economy with the breakdown in America, he was secretly exploiting the frantic necessities of the Soviet leaders to form the basis of one of America's most splendid public collections — Paul Johnson

Partly by accident, partly by instinct, partly by deliberate contrivance, he was the first intellectual systematically to exploit the guilt of the privileged. And he did it, moreover, in an entirely new way, by the systematic cult of rudeness. He was the prototype of that characteristic figure of the modern age, the Angry Young Man. — Paul Johnson

The word 'meaningful' when used today is nearly always meaningless. — Paul Johnson

Where the quest for knowledge is relatively, and now almost absolutely, unrestrained, the public benefit will be great, especially where the certainty of the law ensures that knowledge is rewarded. This is exactly the combination that is the foundation of wealth-creation. — Paul Johnson

Bismarck had cunningly taught the parties not to aim at national appeal but to represent interests. They remained class or sectional pressure-groups under the Republic. This was fatal, for it made the party system, and with it democratic parliamentarianism, seem a divisive rather than a unifying factor. Worse: it meant the parties never produced a leader who appealed beyond the narrow limits of his own following. — Paul Johnson

In the last generation, with public Christianity in headlong retreat, we have caught our first, distant view of a de-Christianized world , and it is not encouraging. — Paul Johnson

I like that lady - Sarah Palin. She's great. I like the cut of her jib. — Paul Johnson

The Bible sees a peculiar virtue in powerlessness, appropriate to a people which has seldom possessed power, and suffered much from its exercise; but it also sees virtue in achievement, and achievement as the sign of virtue, especially of those once weak and lowly. Both Joseph and Moses had no rights of birth, and narrowly survived vulnerable childhoods or youth; but both had the God-endowed qualities to bring them to greatness by their own efforts. — Paul Johnson

The most socially subversive institution of our time is the one-parent family. — Paul Johnson

Margaret Thatcher had more impact on the world than any woman ruler since Catherine the Great of Russia. Not only did she turn around - decisively - the British economy in the 1980s, she also saw her methods copied in more than 50 countries. — Paul Johnson

A Stalin functionary admitted, Innocent people were arrested: naturally - otherwise no one would be frightened. If people, he said, were arrested only for specific misdemeanours, all the others would feel safe and so become ripe for treason. — Paul Johnson

Those who buy in to global warming wish to drastically curb human economic and industrial activities, regardless of the consequences for people, especially the poor. — Paul Johnson

This was all very well: Columbanus's success indicates the appeal of his mission. But his activities, for the first time, brought the nature of Celtic monasticism firmly to the attention of the Church authorities
to western bishops in general, and to the Bishop of Rome in particular. The Irish monks were not heretical. But they were plainly unorthodox. They did not look right, to begin with. They had the wrong tonsure. Rome, as was natural, had 'the tonsure of St Peter', that is, a shaven crown. Easterners had the tonsure of St Paul, totally shaven; and if they wished to take up an appointment in the West they had to wait until their rim grew before being invested. But the Celts looked like nothing on earth: they had their hair long at the back and, on the shaven front part, a half-circle of hair from one ear to the other, leaving a band across the forehead. — Paul Johnson

Every good historian is almost by definition a revisionist. He looks at the accepted view of a particular historic episode or period with a very critical eye. — Paul Johnson

The image of the scientist who puts the pursuit of truth before anything else has been shattered and replaced by a man on the make or a quasi-religious enthusiast who wants to prove his case at any cost. Science is becoming the tool of campaigning warfare, in which truth is the first casualty. — Paul Johnson

Most people are resistant to ideas, especially new ones. But they are
fascinated by character. Extravagance of personality is one way in which
the pill can be sugared and the public induced to look at works dealing
with ideas. — Paul Johnson

The idea that human beings have changed and are changing the basic climate system of the Earth through their industrial activities and burning of fossil fuels - the essence of the Greens' theory of global warming - has about as much basis in science as Marxism and Freudianism. — Paul Johnson

There were as many Jews as Greeks in the Roman empire, and a higher proportion of them were literate. — Paul Johnson

Wisdom lies not in possessing knowledge
- which quickly becomes outdated -
but in perpetually seeking it. — Paul Johnson

Sombart ignored the powerful mystical element in Judaism. He refused to recognize, as did Weber, that wherever these religious systems, including Judaism, were at their most powerful and authoritarian, commerce did not flourish. Jewish businessmen, like Calvinist ones, tended to operate most successfully when they had left their traditional religious environment and had moved to fresh pastures. — Paul Johnson

Descartes' dictum: 'There is nothing so absurd or incredible that it has not been asserted by one philosopher or another. — Paul Johnson

For me this is the vital litmus test: no intellectual society can flourish where a Jew feels even slightly uneasy. — Paul Johnson

Would you like a little Sheesh with that Whine? — Paul Johnson

How could the Christian Church, apparently quite willingly, accommodate this weird megalomaniac [Constantine] in it's theocratic system? Was there a conscious bargain? Which side benefited most form this unseemly marriage between church and state? Or, to put it another way, did the empire surrender to Christianity, or did Christianity prostitute itself to the empire? It is characteristic of the complexities of early Christian history that we cannot give a definite answer to this question. — Paul Johnson

To many, Heathrow in August is a paradigm of Hell. — Paul Johnson

Scanning the newspapers and absorbing with a mixture of incredulity and indignation the enormities they report, I conclude that what England lacks today is, quite simply, sense. — Paul Johnson

Is there any possibility of giving international air travel, which we all need and use and hate, a touch of glamour, or even of reliable, soulless efficiency? I suspect future historians will puzzle over our failure. But by then, of course, we shall be in the age of mass space travel, with its fresh and unimaginable crop of horrors. — Paul Johnson

The most evil person I ever met was a toss-up between Pablo Picasso and the publisher-crook Robert Maxwell. — Paul Johnson

We must not allow the academic prejudices bred by Hegelian ideology, anti-clericalism, anti-Semitism and nineteenth-century intellectual fashions to distort our view of these texts. All the internal evidence shows that those who set down and conflated these writings, and the scribes who copied them when the canon was assembled after the return from Exile, believed absolutely in the divine inspiration of the ancient texts and transcribed them with veneration and the highest possible standards of accuracy, including many passages which they manifestly did not understand. Indeed, the Pentateuch text twice gives solemn admonitions, from God himself, against tampering: 'Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall you diminish aught from it.'25 — Paul Johnson

Indeed it is the protean ability of Western civilization to be self-critical and self-correcting - not only in producing wealth but over the whole range of human activities - that constitutes its most decisive superiority over any of its rivals. — Paul Johnson

One of the categories of people I don't like much are intellectuals. People say, 'Oh, you're an intellectual,' and I say, 'No!' What is an intellectual? An intellectual is somebody who thinks ideas are more important than people. — Paul Johnson

After the Germans and Austrians, the Rumanians were the biggest killers of Jews. They were more inclined to inflict beatings and torture, or to rape, the officers being worse than the men since they selected the prettiest Jewish girls for orgies. — Paul Johnson

Marxism, Freudianism, global warming. These are proof - of which history offers so many examples - that people can be suckers on a grand scale. To their fanatical followers they are a substitute for religion. Global warming, in particular, is a creed, a faith, a dogma that has little to do with science. — Paul Johnson

He [Augustine] admitted: 'I am the sort of man who writes because he has made progress, and who makes progress by writing.' — Paul Johnson

Nothing appeals to intellectuals more than the feeling that they represent 'the people'. Nothing, as a rule, is further from the truth — Paul Johnson

Human beings are infinitely worth studying, especially the peculiarities that often go along with outstanding gifts. — Paul Johnson

In 1924 Mao took a Chinese friend, newly arrived from Europe, to see the notorious sign in the Shanghai park, 'Chinese and Dogs Not Allowed'. — Paul Johnson

Global warming, like Marxism, is a political theory of actions, demanding compliance with its rules. — Paul Johnson

Marx wrote about finance and industry all his life but he only knew two people connected with financial and industrial processes. One was his uncle in Holland, Lion Philips, a successful businessman who created what eventually became the vast Philips Electric Company. Uncle Philips' views on the whole capitalist process would have been well-informed and interesting, had Marx troubled to explore them. But he only once consulted him, on a technical matter of high finance, and though he visited Philips four times, these concerned purely personal mattes of family money. The other knowledgeable man was Engels himself. But Marx declined Engel's invitation to accompany him on a visit to a cotton mill, and so far as we know Marx never set foot in a mill, factory, mine or other industrial workplace in the whole of his life. — Paul Johnson

Hell is being trapped in a night-club with the'beautiful people'and forced to live in a'luxury penthouse flat'. — Paul Johnson

Rousseau's ideas brought about-he moved the political process to the very centre of human existence by making the legislator, who is also a pedagogue, into the new Messiah, capable of solving all human problems by creating New Men. 'Everything,' he wrote, 'is at root dependent on politics.' Virtue is the product of good government. 'Vices belong less to man, than to man badly governed.' The political process, and the new kind of state it brings into being, are the universal remedies for the ills of mankind.49 Politics will do all. Rousseau thus prepared the blueprint for the principal delusions and follies of the twentieth century. — Paul Johnson

John Major is what he is: a man from nowhere, going nowhere, heading for a well-merited obscurity as fast as his mediocre talents can carry him. — Paul Johnson

Augustine was struck by the fact, when they first met, that Ambrose read to himself, a habit unknown to the classical world: 'His eyes scanned the page, and his mind penetrated its meaning, but his voice and tongue were silent.' There were other impressive things about Ambrose. — Paul Johnson

Pious Jews saw heaven as a vast library, with the Archangel Metatron as the librarian: the books in the shelves there pressed themselves together to make room for a newcomer. — Paul Johnson

When people talk about political correctness, the only element of any value is good manners. — Paul Johnson

The only thing to be said for air travel is speed. It makes possible travel on a scale unimaginable before our present age. Between the ages of 20 and four-score I visited every country in Europe, all save two in Latin America, ditto in Africa, and most of Asia, not counting eight trips to Australia and 60 to the United States - all by air. — Paul Johnson

I very much wanted to live in Paris when I was in the army, and I was quite determined to. I could have become a dress designer: Dior was willing to take me on as an assistant, but he did not have an immediate vacancy. — Paul Johnson

A deliberate plan is not always necessary for the highest art; it emerges. — Paul Johnson

Not only is man, as a category, created in God's image; all individual men are also created in God's image. In this sense they are all equal. Nor is this equality notional; it is real in one all-important sense. All Israelites are equal before God, and therefore equal before his law. Justice is for all, irrespective of other inequalities which may exist. All kinds of privileges are implicit and explicit in the Mosaic code, but on essentials it does not distinguish between varieties of the faithful. All, moreover, shared in accepting the covenant; it was a popular, even a democratic, decision. — Paul Johnson

inside the angry man a fearful one cowered. — Paul Johnson

It was part of Rousseau's vanity that he believed himself incapable of base emotions. 'I feel too superior to hate.' 'I love myself too much to hate anybody. — Paul Johnson

There are no inevitabilities in history — Paul Johnson

At some time in their careers, most good historians itch to write a history of the world, endeavor to discover what makes humanity the most destructive and creative of species. — Paul Johnson

The urge to distribute wealth equally, and still more the belief that it can be brought about by political action, is the most dangerous of all popular emotions. It is the legitimation of envy, of all the deadly sins the one which a stable society based on consensus should fear the most. The monster state is a source of many evils; but it is, above all, an engine of envy. — Paul Johnson

The whole world depends on America ultimately, particularly Britain. And also, I love America - a marvelous country. But in a sense I don't worry about America because I think America has such huge strengths - particularly its freedom of thought and expression - that it's going to survive as a top nation for the foreseeable future. — Paul Johnson

Mr. Churchill, sir, to what do you attribute your success in life?" Without pause or hesitation, he replied: "Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down." He — Paul Johnson

In the long term, it is desirable that the human race, faced with the prospect of extinction on Earth, should prepare an escape route for itself to another inhabitable planet. — Paul Johnson

If we want foxes, to observe and delight in, we must have hunting. — Paul Johnson

Like many physical diseases, anti-Semitism is highly infectious, and can become endemic in certain localities and societies. Though a disease of the mind, it is by no means confined to weak, feeble, or commonplace intellects; as history sadly records, its carriers have included men and women of otherwise powerful and subtle thoughts. — Paul Johnson

A capitalist economy hums when leading businessmen are bubbling with animal spirits and are prepared to sink their money into risky ventures. — Paul Johnson

It would be wrong to say I enjoy having rows, because that would be un-Christian. If people attack me, then I respond, or if they do very wicked things. Then they must be brought to book. — Paul Johnson

Who was this Abraham, and where did he come from? The Book of Genesis and related Biblical passages are the only evidence that he existed and these were compiled in written form perhaps a thousand years after his supposed lifetime. — Paul Johnson

Karl Heinzen, who retaliated with a memorable portrait of the angry little man. He found Marx 'intolerably dirty', a 'cross between a cat and an ape'; with 'dishevelled coal-black hair and dirty yellow complexion'. It was, he said, impossible to say whether his clothes and skin were naturally mud-coloured or just filthy. He had small, fierce, malicious eyes, 'spitting out spurts of wicked fire'; he had a habit of saying: 'I will annihilate you. — Paul Johnson

The ancient writers were not merely convinced of Moses' existence: they saw him as one of the formative figures of world history. — Paul Johnson

The freedom enjoyed in Western society under the rule of law and constitutional government explains both the quality of its civilization and its wealth. — Paul Johnson

His (Lenin's)humanitarianism was a very abstract passion. It embraced humanity in general but he seems to have had little love for, or even interest in, humanity in particular. He saw the people with whom he dealt, his comrades, not as individuals but as receptacles for his ideas. On that basis, and no other, they were judged. He judged man not by their moral qualities but by their views, or rather the degree to which they accepted his. — Paul Johnson

Men are excessively ruthless and cruel not as a rule out of malice but from outraged righteousness. How much more is this true of legally constituted states, invested with all this seeming moral authority of parliaments and congresses and courts of justice! The destructive capacity of an individual, however vicious, is small; of the state, however well-intentioned, almost limitless. Expand the state and the destructive capacity necessarily expands too. Collective righteousness is far more ungovernable than any individual pursuit of revenge. That was a point well understood by Woodrow Wilson, who warned: 'Once lead this people into war and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. — Paul Johnson

Democracy has many enemies, and the terrorist is only one of them. — Paul Johnson

What strikes the historian surveying anti-Semitism worldwide over more than two millennia is its fundamental irrationality. It seems to make no sense, any more than malaria or meningitis makes sense. — Paul Johnson

If you depart from moral absolutes, you go into a bottomless pit. Communism and Nazism were catastrophic evils which both derived from moral relativism. Their differences were minor compared to their similarities. — Paul Johnson

The Revolution was a lesson in the power of evil to replace idealism, and Bonaparte was its ideal pupil. — Paul Johnson

The century's most radical vice ... the notion that human beings can be shoveled around like concrete. — Paul Johnson

If the decline of Christianity created the modern political zealot - and his crimes - so the evaporation of religious faith among the educated left a vacuum in the minds of Western intellectuals easily filled by secular superstition. There is no other explanation for the credulity with which scientists, accustomed to evaluating evidence, and writers, whose whole function was to study and criticize society, accepted the crudest Stalinist propaganda at its face value. They needed to believe; they wanted to be duped. — Paul Johnson

Not interested in food or drink, he ate his meals, if he had any choice in the matter, in ten minutes and never caroused. No one ever saw him drunk. — Paul Johnson

The most intimidating world leader was Lyndon Johnson, who became U.S. President when John Kennedy was assassinated. He exulted in this power and liked to inspire fear. — Paul Johnson

In the past, the U.S. has shown its capacity to reinvent its gifts for leadership. During the 1970s, in the aftermath of the Nixon abdication and the Ford and Carter presidencies, the whole nation peered into the abyss, was horrified by what it saw and elected Ronald Reagan as president, which began a national resurgence. — Paul Johnson

I very much wanted to be editor of the 'New Statesman!' But I never wanted to be prime minister, except maybe as a little boy. — Paul Johnson

My grandfather used to say, "Learn to like art, music and literature deeply and passionately. They will be your friends when things are bad". It is true: at this time of year, when days are short and dark, and one hardly dares to open the newspapers, I turn, not vainly either, to the great creators of the past for distraction, solace and help. — Paul Johnson

We must never forget that the settlement of what is now the United States was only part of a larger enterprise. And this was the work of the best and brightest of the entire European continent. They were greedy. — Paul Johnson

The United States is a concept that works very well, even in bad times. But that's no reason to think its structure can be superimposed with success on any other part of the world, particularly when times are terrible. — Paul Johnson

I was very fond of Princess Diana. She used to have me over to lunch to ask my advice. I'd give her good advice, and she'd say: 'I entirely agree. Paul, you're so right.' Then she'd go and do the opposite. — Paul Johnson

Confusion has always surrounded Rousseau's political ideas because he was in many respects an inconsistent and contradictory — Paul Johnson