In Germany, as in parts of Yorkshire, laughing – at least among people with pretensions to rank – was regarded as a form of weakness. Goethe, whose own laughter was seldom observed, thought a lady might laugh where a gentleman should keep a straight face. Frederick the Great might laugh with a Frenchman, such as Voltaire, but “would not so condescend” with his compatriots.

— Paul Johnson

Paul Johnson Quotes

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

The fact is, the Mosaic code was far more humane than any other, because, being God-centred, it was automatically man-centred also.

— Paul Johnson

He took Gaza, then Jaffa, where, fearing trouble from his 4,500 prisoners, he ordered them all slaughtered, which was done by bayonet thrusting or drowning, to save ammunition. Many women and children suffered in this atrocity, probably the worst of all Bonaparte’s war crimes.

— Paul Johnson

Mao was several inches taller than Stalin, and this was a bitter pill to swallow, since Stalin often referred to Asians as “tiny.

— Paul Johnson

The Holocaust was planned; and Hitler planned it. That is the only conclusion which makes sense of the whole horrifying process.

— Paul Johnson

Israel slipped into existence through a fortuitous window in history which briefly opened for a few months in 1947-8. That too was luck; or providence.

— Paul Johnson

The people of Israel were not great craftsmen, or painters, or architects. But writing was their national habit, almost their obsession. They probably produced, in sheer quantity, the greatest literature of antiquity, of which the Old Testament is only a small fragment.

— Paul Johnson

Enlightenment thinkers, both French and German, argued that the objectionable features of Judaism had to be erased before the Jew could be free: Jews who were discriminated against accepted this, and thus often directed their rage more towards the unregenerated Jew than those who persecuted them both.

— Paul Johnson

A man who takes more words than is necessary to tell more than he knows.

— Paul Johnson

Like Rousseau, he loved humanity in general but was often cruel to human beings in particular.

— Paul Johnson

To be an American citizen is one of the world’s great prizes.

— Paul Johnson

The General Will is always righteous.

— Paul Johnson

Ike never needlessly grudged time for a photo session, but he did insist that meetings with individual academics should have a specific and useful purpose. He did on one occasion observe that his academic colleagues tended “to need more time to come to the point than people in the Army,” and he went on the record with this definition of an intellectual: “A man who takes more words than is necessary to tell more than he knows.

— Paul Johnson

Mr. Churchill, sir, to what do you attribute your success in life?” Without pause or hesitation, he replied: “Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.” He.

— 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

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

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

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

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

The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas.

— Paul Johnson
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