Paul Johnson Quotes

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

  Paul Johnson

  People, Feelings, Appeals

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• The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.

  Paul Johnson

  Powerful, Earth Day, Arrogance

  Paul Johnson (1980). “The Things that are Not Caesar's”

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• 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

  War, World, Versailles

  Paul Johnson (1972). “The offshore islanders; England's people from Roman occupation to the present”

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• 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

  Differences, Evil, Pits

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

  Paul Johnson

  Art, Planning, Intellect

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• 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

  Fear, Evil, Envy

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• 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

  Life, Art, Dark

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

  Paul Johnson

  Family, Parent, Institutions

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

  Paul Johnson

  Political, Action, Global Warming

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

  Paul Johnson

  Evil, Crooks, Toss

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• 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

  Christian, Religious, Views

  Paul Johnson (2012). “History of Christianity”, p.720, Simon and Schuster

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• 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

  Passion, Men, Ideas

  Paul Johnson (2013). “Modern Times: A History of the World From the 1920s to the Year 2000”, Hachette UK

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• 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

  Unique, Views, Racism

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• 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

  People, Example, Followers

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• 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

  Race, Long, Earth

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

  Paul Johnson

  Intellectual, Tests, Jew

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

  Paul Johnson

  Fear, People, Would Be

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

  Paul Johnson

  Believe, Scary, Affair

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• 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

  Eye, Views, History

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

  Paul Johnson

  Beautiful, Children, Railroads

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

  Paul Johnson

  Political, Vices, Century

  Paul Johnson (1991). “Modern times: the world from the twenties to the nineties”, HarperCollins Publishers

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

  Paul Johnson

  Reality, Horror, Devices

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• 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

  Growth, Balance, Culture

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• 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

  Party, Class, Pressure Groups

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• There are no inevitabilities in history

  Paul Johnson

  Inspirational, Inevitability

  Paul Johnson (1983). “Modern times: the world from the twenties to the eighties”, HarperCollins Publishers

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