Paul Johnson Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. When people talk about political correctness, the only element of any value is good manners.

Paul Johnson

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

Paul Johnson

#5. Would you like a little Sheesh with that Whine?

Paul Johnson

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. The word 'meaningful' when used today is nearly always meaningless.

Paul Johnson

#9. A deliberate plan is not always necessary for the highest art; it emerges.

Paul Johnson

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. As a child I found railroad stations exciting, mysterious, and even beautiful, as indeed they often were.

Paul Johnson

#14. It takes less than a decade for today's luxury to become a universal necessity.

Paul Johnson

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. I like that lady - Sarah Palin. She's great. I like the cut of her jib.

Paul Johnson

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. At Tulsa, Oklahoma, on 30 May 1921, fifty whites and two hundred blacks were murdered.

Paul Johnson

#25. If I see a door ajar, I push on it to see how far it will open, and if it opens wide I go through it.

Paul Johnson

#26. Courage is the essential element in any great public man or woman.

Paul Johnson

#27. The century's most radical vice ... the notion that human beings can be shoveled around like concrete.

Paul Johnson

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. Democracy has many enemies, and the terrorist is only one of them.

Paul Johnson

#32. There are no inevitabilities in history

Paul Johnson

#33. 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

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

Paul Johnson

#35. 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

#36. 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

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

Paul Johnson

#38. You know you're an Arizona native when you have to look up "mass transit" in the dictionary.

Paul Johnson

#39. If we want foxes, to observe and delight in, we must have hunting.

Paul Johnson

#40. 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

#41. The writer learns to write, in the last resort, only by writing. He must get words onto paper even if he is dissatisfied with them.

Paul Johnson

#42. Next to courage, willpower is the most important thing in politics.

Paul Johnson

#43. 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

#44. 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

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

Paul Johnson

#46. 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

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

Paul Johnson

#48. Human beings are infinitely worth studying, especially the peculiarities that often go along with outstanding gifts.

Paul Johnson

#49. This book is dedicated to the people of America
strong, outspoken, intense in their convictions, sometimes wrong-headed but always generous and brave, with a passion for justice no nation has ever matched.

Paul Johnson

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

Paul Johnson

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

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

Paul Johnson

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

Paul Johnson

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

Paul Johnson

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. Global warming, like Marxism, is a political theory of actions, demanding compliance with its rules.

Paul Johnson

#63. Confusion has always surrounded Rousseau's political ideas because he was in many respects an inconsistent and contradictory

Paul Johnson

#64. As the CIA and KGB, like God and Satan, fight Miltonic battles across five continents ...

Paul Johnson

#65. I've been having an affair, but I still believe in family values.

Paul Johnson

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. inside the angry man a fearful one cowered.

Paul Johnson

#70. Euphemism is a human device to conceal the horrors of reality.

Paul Johnson

#71. Shelley's love was deep, sincere, passionate, indeed everlasting-but it was always changing its object.

Paul Johnson

#72. In all its myriad manifestations, the language of anti-Semitism through the ages is a dictionary of non-sequiturs and antonyms, a thesaurus of illogic and inconsistency.

Paul Johnson

#73. 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

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

Paul Johnson

#75. Germany's Angela Merkel exudes an atmosphere of elderly exhaustion and pooped-out pessimism. Britain's David Cameron, though by nature exuberant, feels he has to look and sound glum. And France's leader, Francois Hollande, seems determined to drive every successful businessman out of the country.

Paul Johnson

#76. 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

#77. To many, Heathrow in August is a paradigm of Hell.

Paul Johnson

#78. 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

#79. I don't write huge books any more. I used to write 1,000 printed pages, but now I write short books. I did one on Napoleon, 50,000 words - enjoyed doing that. He was a baddie. I did one on Churchill, which was a bestseller in New York, I'm glad to say. 50,000 words. He was a goodie.

Paul Johnson

#80. Wisdom lies not in possessing knowledge
- which quickly becomes outdated -
but in perpetually seeking it.

Paul Johnson

#81. The most socially subversive institution of our time is the one-parent family.

Paul Johnson

#82. There were as many Jews as Greeks in the Roman empire, and a higher proportion of them were literate.

Paul Johnson