Paul Johnson Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

Wisdom lies not in possessing knowledge - which quickly becomes outdated - but in perpetually seeking it.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

There are no inevitabilities in history

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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