Paul Johnson > Quotes

“Marx wrote about finance and industry all his life but he only knew two people connected with financial and industrial processes. One was his uncle in Holland, Lion Philips, a successful businessman who created what eventually became the vast Philips Electric Company. Uncle Philips' views on the whole capitalist process would have been well-informed and interesting, had Marx troubled to explore them. But he only once consulted him, on a technical matter of high finance, and though he visited Philips four times, these concerned purely personal mattes of family money. The other knowledgeable man was Engels himself. But Marx declined Engel's invitation to accompany him on a visit to a cotton mill, and so far as we know Marx never set foot in a mill, factory, mine or other industrial workplace in the whole of his life.”
― Paul Johnson

“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, Modern Times : A History of the World from the 1920s to the Year 2000

“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, Modern Times : A History of the World from the 1920s to the Year 2000

“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, Modern Times : A History of the World from the 1920s to the Year 2000

“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, Modern Times : A History of the World from the 1920s to the Year 2000

“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, Modern Times : A History of the World from the 1920s to the Year 2000

“Most people are resistant to ideas, especially new ones. But they are
fascinated by character. Extravagance of personality is one way in which
the pill can be sugared and the public induced to look at works dealing
with ideas.”
― Paul Johnson

“We must never forget that the settlement of what is now the United States was only part of a larger enterprise. And this was the work of the best and brightest of the entire European continent. They were greedy.”
― Paul Johnson

“The truth is, even the most superficial inquiry into Marx’s use of evidence forces one to treat with scepticism everything he wrote which relies on factual data. He can never be trusted.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: A fascinating examination of whether intellectuals are morally fit to give advice to humanity

“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, Modern Times

“It is a curious delusion of intellectuals, from Rousseau onwards, that they can solve the perennial difficulties of human education at a stroke, by setting up a new system.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: A fascinating examination of whether intellectuals are morally fit to give advice to humanity

“The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“But Hemingway had had the advantage of an excellent training on the Kansas City Star. Its successive editors had compiled a house-style book of 110 rules designed to force reporters to use plain, simple, direct and cliché-free English, and these rules were strictly enforced. Hemingway later called them ‘the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing’.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: A fascinating examination of whether intellectuals are morally fit to give advice to humanity

“He did not use the word ‘brainwash’, but he wrote: ‘Those who control a people’s opinions control its actions.’ Such control is established by treating citizens, from infancy, as children of the State, trained to ‘consider themselves only in their relationship to the Body of the State’. ‘For being nothing except by it, they will be nothing except for it. It will have all they have and will be all they are.’ Again, this anticipates Mussolini’s central Fascist doctrine: ‘Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: A fascinating examination of whether intellectuals are morally fit to give advice to humanity

“Proudhon was an anti-dogmatist: ‘For God’s sake,’ he wrote, ‘after we have demolished all the [religious] dogmatism a priori, let us not of all things attempt to instil another kind of dogma into the people … let us not make ourselves the leaders of a new intolerance.’ Marx hated this line.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: A fascinating examination of whether intellectuals are morally fit to give advice to humanity

“When we are dealing with concepts like freedom and equality, it is essential to use words accurately and in good faith. So the eighth commandment is: beware of those who seek to win an argument at the expense of the language. For the fact that they do is proof positive that their argument is false, and proof presumptive that they know it is. A man who deliberately inflicts violence on the language will almost certainly inflict violence on human beings if he acquires the power. Those who treasure the meaning of words will treasure truth, and those who bend words to their purposes are very likely in pursuit of anti-social ones. The correct and honourable use of words is the first and natural credential of civilized status.”
― Paul Johnson

“Though Rousseau writes about the General Will in terms of liberty, it is essentially an authoritarian instrument, an early adumbration of Lenin’s ‘democratic centralism’. Laws made under the General Will must, by definition, have moral authority. ‘The people making laws for itself cannot be unjust.’ The General Will is always righteous.’ Moreover, provided the State is ‘well-intentioned’ (i.e., its long-term objectives are desirable) interpretation of the General Will can safely be left to the leaders since ‘they know well that the General Will always favours the decision most conducive to the public interest.’ Hence any individual who finds himself in opposition to the General Will is in error: ‘When the opinion that is contrary to my own prevails, this simply proves that I was mistaken and that what I thought to be the General Will, was not so.’ Indeed, ‘if my particular opinion had carried the day I should have achieved the opposite of what was my will and I should not therefore have been free.’ We are here almost in the chilly region of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon or George Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: A fascinating examination of whether intellectuals are morally fit to give advice to humanity

“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, Modern Times : A History of the World from the 1920s to the Year 2000

“Russell was a gifted expositor. An early work of his had explained the work of Leibnitz, whom he always revered.6 His brilliant survey, A History of Western Philosophy (1946), is the ablest thing of its kind ever written and was deservedly a best-seller all over the world.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: A fascinating examination of whether intellectuals are morally fit to give advice to humanity

“The Salem [witch] trials…can be seen as an example of the propensity of the American people to be convulsed by spasms of self-righteous rage against enemies, real or imaginary, of their society and way of living. Hence the parallels later drawn between Salem in 1692 and the “Red Scare” of 1919-20, Senator McCarthy’s hunt for Communists in the early 1950’s, the Watergate hysteria of 1973-74, and the Irangate hunt of the 1980s. What strikes the historian, however, is not just the intensity of the self-delusion in the summer of 1692, by no means unusual for the age, but the speed of the recovery from it in the autumn, and the anxiety of the local government and society to confess wrongdoing, to make reparation and search for the truth. That indeed is uncommon in any age. In the late 17th century it was perhaps more remarkable than the hysteria itself and a good augury for America’s future as a humane and truth-seeking commonwealth. The rule of law did indeed break down, but it was restored with promptness and penitence.”
― Paul Johnson

“In spring 1970 a belated attempt was made by the far left in France to Europeanize Mao’s violent Cultural Revolution. The movement was called Proletarian Left and Sartre agreed to join it; in theory he became editor-in-chief of its journal, La Cause du peuple, largely to prevent the police from confiscating it. Its aims were violent enough even for Sartre’s taste – it called for factory managers to be imprisoned and parliamentary deputies to be lynched – but it was crudely romantic, childish and strongly anti-intellectual.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: A fascinating examination of whether intellectuals are morally fit to give advice to humanity

“Van Buren, like many American master-politicians since, was quite capable of combining party ruthlessness with high-mindedness. He was a political schizophrenic, admitting he abused power occasionally and vowing never to do it again (he did of course). ... American political history has since thrown up repeated exemplars of what might be called the Van Buren Syndrome --- men who could combine true zeal for the public interest with fanatical devotion to the party principle.”
― Paul Johnson

“There followed, however, the devastating experience of the Communist Party’s purge of the anarchists on Stalin’s orders. Thousands of Orwell’s comrades were simply murdered or thrown into prison, tortured and executed. He himself was lucky to escape with his life. Almost as illuminating, to him, was the difficulty he found, on his return to England, in getting his account of these terrible events published. Neither Victor Gollancz, in the Left Book Club, nor Kingsley Martin, in the New Statesman – the two principal institutions whereby progressive opinion in Britain was kept informed – would allow him to tell the truth. He was forced to turn elsewhere. Orwell had always put experience before theory, and these events proved how right he had been. Theory taught that the left, when exercising power, would behave justly and respect truth. Experience showed him that the left was capable of a degree of injustice and cruelty of a kind hitherto almost unknown, rivalled only by the monstrous crimes of the German Nazis, and that it would eagerly suppress truth in the cause of the higher truth it upheld. Experience, confirmed by what happened in the Second World War, where all values and loyalties became confused, also taught him that, in the event, human beings mattered more than abstract ideas; it was something he had always felt in his bones. Orwell never wholly abandoned his belief that a better society could be created by the force of ideas, and in this sense he remained an intellectual. But the axis of his attack shifted from existing, traditional and capitalist society to the fraudulent utopias with which intellectuals like Lenin had sought to replace it. His two greatest books, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), were essentially critiques of realized abstractions, of the totalitarian control over mind and body which an embodied utopia demanded, and (as he put it) ‘of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable’.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: A fascinating examination of whether intellectuals are morally fit to give advice to humanity

“By a curious chain of infamous moral logic, Rousseau’s iniquity as a parent was linked to his ideological offspring, the future totalitarian state.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: A fascinating examination of whether intellectuals are morally fit to give advice to humanity

“As Khrushchev put it, “He prodded the capitalist world with the tip of his bayonet.” He himself put it, “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.”
― Paul Johnson, Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer

“Though not a man of action himself – it was one of Camus’s more hurtful gibes that Sartre ‘tried to make history from his armchair’ – he was always encouraging action in others, and action usually meant violence. He became a patron of Frantz Fanon, the African ideologue who might be called the founder of modern black African racism, and wrote a preface to his Bible of violence, Les Damnés de la terre (1961), which is even more bloodthirsty than the text itself. For a black man, Sartre wrote, ‘to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time.’ This was an updating of existentialism: self-liberation through murder. It was Sartre who invented the verbal technique (culled from German philosophy) of identifying the existing order as ‘violent’ (e.g. ‘institutionalized violence’), thus justifying killing to overthrow it. He asserted: ‘For me the essential problem is to reject the theory according to which the left ought not to answer violence with violence.’59 Note: not ‘a’ problem but ‘the essential’ problem. Since Sartre’s writings were very widely disseminated, especially among the young, he thus became the academic godfather to many terrorist movements which began to oppress society from the late 1960s onwards. What he did not foresee, and what a wiser man would have foreseen, was that most of the violence to which he gave philosophical encouragement would be inflicted by blacks not on whites but on other blacks. By helping Fanon to inflame Africa, he contributed to the civil wars and mass murders which have engulfed most of that continent from the mid-1960s onwards to this day. His influence on South-East Asia, where the Vietnam War was drawing to a close, was even more baneful. The hideous crimes committed in Cambodia from April 1975 onwards, which involved the deaths of between a fifth and a third of the population, were organized by a group of Francophone middle-class intellectuals known as the Angka Leu (‘the Higher Organization’). Of its eight leaders, five were teachers, one a university professor, one a civil servant and one an economist. All had studied in France in the 1950s, where they had not only belonged to the Communist Party but had absorbed Sartre’s doctrines of philosophical activism and ‘necessary violence’. These mass murderers were his ideological children.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: A fascinating examination of whether intellectuals are morally fit to give advice to humanity

“Indeed Sartre, like Russell, failed to achieve any kind of coherence and consistency in his views of public policy. No body of doctrine survived him. In the end, again like Russell, he stood for nothing more than a vague desire to belong to the left and the camp of youth. The intellectual decline of Sartre, who after all at one time did seem to be identified with a striking, if confused, philosophy of life, was particularly spectacular. But there is always a large section of the educated public which demands intellectual leaders, however unsatisfactory. Despite his enormities, Rousseau was widely honoured at and after his death. Sartre, another monstre sacré, was given a magnificent funeral by intellectual Paris. Over 50,000 people, most of them young, followed his body into Montparnasse Cemetery. To get a better view, some climbed into the trees. One of them came crashing down onto the coffin itself. To what cause had they come to do honour? What faith, what luminous truth about humanity, were they asserting by their mass presence? We may well ask.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: A fascinating examination of whether intellectuals are morally fit to give advice to humanity

“It is a myth that European youth was ruthlessly sacrificed in 1914 by selfish and cynical age. The speeches of pre-war politicians were crammed with appeals to youth. Youth movements were a European phenomenon, especially in Germany where 25,000 members of the Wandervögel clubs hiked, strummed guitars, protested about pollution and the growth of cities, and damned the old. Opinion-formers like Max Weber and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck demanded that youth be brought to the helm. The nation, wrote Bruck, ‘needs a change of blood, an insurrection of the sons against the fathers, a substitution of the old by the young’.52 All over Europe, sociologists were assiduously studying youth to find out what it thought and wanted. And of course what youth wanted was war. The first pampered ‘youth generation’ went enthusiastically to a war which their elders, almost without exception, accepted with horror or fatalistic despair. Among articulate middle-class youth it was, at the outset at least, the most popular war in history. They dropped their guitars and seized their rifles.”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times: A History of the World From the 1920s to the Year 2000

“While under the tsars the average number of executions was only seventeen, by 1918 the Cheka was killing an average of a thousand people a month for political crimes alone.”
― Paul Johnson, Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer

“The same month, the critic Julius Elias related that over a lunch in Berlin Ibsen told him that: he had met in the Tyrol … a Viennese girl of very remarkable character, who had at once made him her confidant … she was not interested in the idea of marrying some decently brought-up young man … What tempted, fascinated and delighted her was to lure other women’s husbands away from them. She was a demonic little wrecker … a little bird of prey, who would gladly have included him among her victims. He had studied her very very closely. But she had had no great success with him. ‘She did not get hold of me but I got hold of her – for my play.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: A fascinating examination of whether intellectuals are morally fit to give advice to humanity