Paul Johnson Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  55 Copy quote

• 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”

  39 Copy quote

• 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

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  17 Copy quote

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  - which quickly becomes outdated -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

  Paul Johnson

  Lying, Outdated, Seeking

  4 Copy quote

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

  Paul Johnson

  Political, Action, Global Warming

  11 Copy quote

• 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”

  23 Copy quote

• 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

  10 Copy quote

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

  Paul Johnson

  Family, Parent, Institutions

  10 Copy quote

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

  Paul Johnson

  Meaningful, Today, Used

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Paper, Lasts

  4 Copy quote

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

  Paul Johnson

  Art, Planning, Intellect

  19 Copy quote

• 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

  9 Copy quote

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

  Paul Johnson

  Reality, Horror, Devices

  7 Copy quote

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

  Paul Johnson

  Luxury, Today, Universal

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.

  Paul Johnson

  Lying, Energy, Down And

  Paul Johnson (2009). “Churchill”, p.9, Penguin

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Religious, Believe, Political

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  "Modern Times: A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1980s". Book by Paul Johnson, 1983.

  7 Copy quote

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

  Paul Johnson

  Beautiful, Night, Luxury

  1996 To Hell With Picasso, and Other Essays.

  4 Copy quote

• 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, Views

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

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  6 Copy quote

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