Paul Johnson > Quotes

“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

“A deliberate plan is not always necessary for the highest art; it emerges.”
― Paul Johnson

“Nothing appeals to intellectuals more than the feeling that they represent 'the people'. Nothing, as a rule, is further from the truth”
― 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 Bede Johnson, A History of the American People

“He [Augustine] admitted: 'I am the sort of man who writes because he has made progress, and who makes progress by writing.'”
― Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity

“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, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“Descartes’ dictum: ‘There is nothing so absurd or incredible that it has not been asserted by one philosopher or another.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“inside the angry man a fearful one cowered.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“Julian recognized that the strength of the orthodox Church rested to a great extent on the imperial discrimination in its favour. According to Ammianus, he tried to atomize the Church by ending the system:

'He ordered the priests of the different Christian sects, and their supporters to be admitted to the palace, and politely expressed his wish that, their quarrels being over, each might follow his own beliefs without hindrance or fear. He thought that freedom to argue their beliefs would simply deepen their differences, so that he would never be faced by a united common people. He found from experience that no wild beasts are as hostile to men, as Christians are to each other.'

”
― Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity

“Confusion has always surrounded Rousseau’s political ideas because he was in many respects an inconsistent and contradictory”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“Those who control a people’s opinions control its actions.’ Such control is established by treating citizens, from infancy, as children of the State,”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“The laws were now studied, read aloud, memorized. It is probably from this time that we get the Deuteronomic injunction: ‘These commandments which I give you this day are to be kept in your heart; you shall repeat them to your sons, and speak of them indoors and out of doors, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on the hand and wear them as a phylactery on the forehead; write them up on the doorposts of your homes and of your gates.’5 In exile the Jews, deprived of a state, became a nomocracy–voluntarily submitting to rule by a Law which could only be enforced by consent. Nothing like this had occurred before in history.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“Zohar-kabbalah is heresy of the most pernicious kind. Yet it is a fact that this kind of mystic pantheism exercises a curious appeal to very clever people whose customary approach to thought is soberly rational. By a remarkable paradox, the current of speculation which was to carry Spinoza out of Judaism brought him to pantheism too, so that he was the end-product both of the rationalism of Maimonides and the anti-rationalism of his opponents.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“Pope Pius XII, in particular, had failed to condemn the Final Solution, though he knew of it.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“This was the point at which north and south began to bifurcate decisively and indeed at which the term the South came into general parlance. The southern apologists were still, in their hearts, ashamed of slavery. That is why they used a euphemism. To them, it was not slavery—a word they never spoke, if possible—but “the peculiar institution.” The use of euphemisms was to become an outstanding characteristic of the modern world which was being born, and nowhere was it employed more assiduously than in the South’s defense of unfree labor.”
― Paul Johnson, The Birth Of The Modern: World Society 1815-1830

“There is in Israelite-Jewish literature of this period none of the aimlessness of pagan myth and chronicle. The narrative is set down with an overwhelming purpose, to tell the story, both elevating and minatory, of a people’s relationship with God, and because the purpose is so serious, the story must be accurate–that is, the writer must believe in it, in his heart. So it is history, and since it deals with the evolution of institutions, as well as war and conquest, it is peculiarly instructive history to us.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“Shelley’s love was deep, sincere, passionate, indeed everlasting-but it was always changing its object.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“Creativity, I believe, is inherent in all of us. We are the progeny of almighty God. God is defined in many ways: all-powerful, all-wise, and all-seeing; everlasting; the lawgiver; the ultimate source of love, beauty, justice, and happiness. Most of all, he is the creator. He created the universe, and those who inhabit it; and, in creating us, he made us in his own image, so that his personality and capacities, however feebly, are reflected in our minds, bodies, and immortal spirits. So we are, by our nature, creators as well.”
― Paul Johnson, Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney

“Virtue is the product of good government. ‘Vices belong less to man, than to man badly governed.’ The political process, and the new kind of state it brings into being, are the universal remedies for the ills of mankind.49 Politics will do all. Rousseau thus prepared the blueprint for the principal delusions and follies of the twentieth century.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“Indeed, there are recurrent hints in the Bible that the Israelites had feelings of guilt about taking the Canaanites’ land,147 a curious adumbration of Israeli twinges about homeless Palestinian Arabs in the late twentieth century. The Israelites, however, hid any remorse in the belief that the conquest was a pious act: it is ‘because of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord is driving them out before you’.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“How could the Christian Church, apparently quite willingly, accommodate this weird megalomaniac [Constantine] in it's theocratic system? Was there a conscious bargain? Which side benefited most form this unseemly marriage between church and state? Or, to put it another way, did the empire surrender to Christianity, or did Christianity prostitute itself to the empire? It is characteristic of the complexities of early Christian history that we cannot give a definite answer to this question.”
― Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity

“the emperor’s two chief ministers were detected in a plan to replace Bonaparte by Murat, the emperor subjected Talleyrand to a lengthy and public dressing down in front of an astonished court. His parade-ground language was shocking, as in his tirade to Whitworth—he called Talleyrand “merde en bas-de-soie” (a shit in silk stockings)—and from that day to this, no one knows whether Bonaparte’s loss of temper was deliberate or not.”
― Paul Johnson, Napoleon: A Life

“If Paul brought the first generation of Christians the useful skills of a trained theologian, Origen was the first great philosopher to rethink the new religion from first principles. As his philosophical enemy, the anti-Christian Porphyry, summed it up, he 'introduced Greek ideas to foreign fables' -- that is, gave a barbarous eastern religion the intellectual respectability of a philosophical defense. Origen was also a phenomenon. As Eusebius put it admiringly, 'even the facts from his cradle are worth mentioning'. Origen came from Alexandria, the second city of the empire and then it's intellectual centre; his father's martyrdom left him an orphan at seventeen with six younger brothers. He was a hard working prodigy, at eighteen head of the Catechetical School, and already trained as a literary scholar and teacher. But at this point, probably in 203, he became a religious fanatic and remained one for the next fifty years. He gave up his job and sold his books to concentrate on religion. he slept on the floor, ate no meat, drank no wine, had only one coat and no shoes. He almost certainly castrated himself, in obedience to the notorious text, Matthew 19:12, 'there are some who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake.' Origen's learning was massive and it was of a highly original kind: he always went back to the sources and thought through the whole process himself. This he learned Hebrew and, according to Eusebius, 'got into his possession the original writings extant among the Jews in the actual Hebrew character'. These included the discovery of lost texts; in the case of the psalms, Origen collected not only the four known texts but three others unearthed, including 'one he found at Jericho in a jar'. The result was an enormous tome, the Hexapla, which probably existed in only one manuscript now lost, setting out the seven alternative texts in parallel columns. He applied the same principles of original research to every aspect of Christianity and sacred literature. He seems to have worked all day and though most of the night, and was a compulsive writer. Even the hardy Jerome later complained: 'Has anyone read everything Origen wrote?'”
― Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity

“The evil of competition, as he saw it, which destroys man’s inborn communal sense and encourages all his most evil traits, including his desire to exploit others, led Rousseau to distrust private property, as the source of social crime.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“Not interested in food or drink, he ate his meals, if he had any choice in the matter, in ten minutes and never caroused. No one ever saw him drunk.”
― Paul Johnson, Napoleon: A Life

“Jews who became socialists in the nineteenth century and who attacked the unequal distribution of wealth produced by liberal, laissez-faire capitalism were expressing in contemporary language Jewish principles which were 3,000 years old and which had become part of the instincts of the people.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“Like Rousseau, he loved humanity in general but was often cruel to human beings in particular.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“Twain had it too and Alexander Woollcott. Stephen Spender and Barbara Skelton insisted Cyril Connolly had it, on rare occasions, when the word for it was “magnificent,” but I only heard faint echoes of this gigantic gift. Sir Isaiah Berlin had it, and I heard him: but the trouble was, once he got really going on a line of fantastic humor, he began to speak so fast, and his accent became so impenetrable, that the sense wasdifficult to grasp, though his evident delight in his fun was so furious that you laughed all the same.”
― Paul Johnson, Humorists: From Hogarth to Noel Coward – Captivating Biographical Portraits of the Western World's Greatest Wits

“He believed he had a unique love for humanity and had been endowed with unprecedented gifts and insights to increase its felicity.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, had been issued a suicide pill, but he was also provided with a parachute and he used it.”
― Paul Johnson, Eisenhower: A Life