Paul Johnson Quotes
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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.
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It takes less than a decade for today's luxury to become a universal necessity.
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If we want foxes, to observe and delight in, we must have hunting.
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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.
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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.
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Democracy has many enemies, and the terrorist is only one of them.
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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.
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For me this is the vital litmus test: no intellectual society can flourish where a Jew feels even slightly uneasy.
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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.
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As a child I found railroad stations exciting, mysterious, and even beautiful, as indeed they often were.
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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.
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Human beings are infinitely worth studying, especially the peculiarities that often go along with outstanding gifts.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Euphemism is a human device to conceal the horrors of reality.
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As the CIA and KGB, like God and Satan, fight Miltonic battles across five continents.
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I like that lady - Sarah Palin. She's great. I like the cut of her jib.
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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. A young writer must cross many psychological barriers to acquire confidence in his capacity to produce good work-especially his first full-length book-and he cannot do this by staring at a piece of blank paper, searching for the perfect sentence.
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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.
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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.
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The most evil person I ever met was a toss-up between Pablo Picasso and the publisher-crook Robert Maxwell.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The most socially subversive institution of our time is the one-parent family.
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To many, Heathrow in August is a paradigm of Hell.
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A deliberate plan is not always necessary for the highest art; it emerges.
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