Paul Johnson Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

Men are excessively ruthless and cruel not as a rule out of malice but from outraged righteousness. How much more is this true of legally constituted states, invested with all this seeming moral authority of parliaments and congresses and courts of justice! The destructive capacity of an individual, however vicious, is small; of the state, however well-intentioned, almost limitless. Expand the state and the destructive capacity necessarily expands too. Collective righteousness is far more ungovernable than any individual pursuit of revenge. That was a point well understood by Woodrow Wilson, who warned: 'Once lead this people into war and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.

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

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

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

Paul Johnson
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
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
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
If we want foxes, to observe and delight in, we must have hunting.

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

Paul Johnson
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

Paul Johnson