Paul Johnson
Paul Johnson
British journalist, author, and historian who edited the New Statesman and penned over forty works, including the 1959 novel, Left of Centre, and the 1997 non-fiction work, A History of the American People. He also wrote four works on art and architecture and two memoirs.
NationalityBritish
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth2 November 1928
study outstanding humans
Human beings are infinitely worth studying, especially the peculiarities that often go along with outstanding gifts.
party class pressure-groups
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.
inspirational inevitability
There are no inevitabilities in history
people example followers
Marxism, Freudianism, global warming. These are proof - of which history offers so many examples - that people can be suckers on a grand scale. To their fanatical followers they are a substitute for religion. Global warming, in particular, is a creed, a faith, a dogma that has little to do with science.
race long earth
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.
reality horror devices
Euphemism is a human device to conceal the horrors of reality.
political vices century
...the century's most radical vice... the notion that human beings can be shoveled around like concrete.
political action global-warming
Global warming, like Marxism, is a political theory of actions, demanding compliance with its rules.
differences evil pits
If you depart from moral absolutes, you go into a bottomless pit. Communism and Nazism were catastrophic evils which both derived from moral relativism. Their differences were minor compared to their similarities.
believe scary affair
I've been having an affair, but I still believe in family values.
war world versailles
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.
art planning intellect
A deliberate plan is not always necessary for the highest art; it emerges.
powerful earth-day arrogance
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.
people feelings appeals
Nothing appeals to intellectuals more than the feeling that they represent 'the people'. Nothing, as a rule, is further from the truth