Paul Johnson quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Paul Johnson

Paul Johnson Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Paul Johnson on Wise Famous Quotes.

As the CIA and KGB, like God and Satan, fight Miltonic battles across five continents ...

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

Would you like a little Sheesh with that Whine?

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

The writer learns to write, in the last resort, only by writing. He must get words onto paper even if he is dissatisfied with them.

At Tulsa, Oklahoma, on 30 May 1921, fifty whites and two hundred blacks were murdered.

The ancient writers were not merely convinced of Moses' existence: they saw him as one of the formative figures of world history.

To many, Heathrow in August is a paradigm of Hell.

Human beings are infinitely worth studying, especially the peculiarities that often go along with outstanding gifts.

There are no inevitabilities in history

The most evil person I ever met was a toss-up between Pablo Picasso and the publisher-crook Robert Maxwell.

Confusion has always surrounded Rousseau's political ideas because he was in many respects an inconsistent and contradictory

When people talk about political correctness, the only element of any value is good manners.

It takes less than a decade for today's luxury to become a universal necessity.

inside the angry man a fearful one cowered.

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'.

The word 'meaningful' when used today is nearly always meaningless.

I very much wanted to be editor of the 'New Statesman!' But I never wanted to be prime minister, except maybe as a little boy.

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.

Global warming, like Marxism, is a political theory of actions, demanding compliance with its rules.

Descartes' dictum: 'There is nothing so absurd or incredible that it has not been asserted by one philosopher or another.

I've been having an affair, but I still believe in family values.

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

A capitalist economy hums when leading businessmen are bubbling with animal spirits and are prepared to sink their money into risky ventures.

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

He [Augustine] admitted: 'I am the sort of man who writes because he has made progress, and who makes progress by writing.'

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.

As a child I found railroad stations exciting, mysterious, and even beautiful, as indeed they often were.

Shelley's love was deep, sincere, passionate, indeed everlasting-but it was always changing its object.

For me this is the vital litmus test: no intellectual society can flourish where a Jew feels even slightly uneasy.

The century's most radical vice ... the notion that human beings can be shoveled around like concrete.

I like that lady - Sarah Palin. She's great. I like the cut of her jib.

Nothing appeals to intellectuals more than the feeling that they represent 'the people'. Nothing, as a rule, is further from the truth

The Revolution was a lesson in the power of evil to replace idealism, and Bonaparte was its ideal pupil.

There were as many Jews as Greeks in the Roman empire, and a higher proportion of them were literate.

Democracy has many enemies, and the terrorist is only one of them.

Wisdom lies not in possessing knowledge
- which quickly becomes outdated -
but in perpetually seeking it.

Next to courage, willpower is the most important thing in politics.

A deliberate plan is not always necessary for the highest art; it emerges.

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.

Courage is the essential element in any great public man or woman.

John Major is what he is: a man from nowhere, going nowhere, heading for a well-merited obscurity as fast as his mediocre talents can carry him.

Long periods of recession, which tend to be self-perpetuating, are usually ended by war, or by preparations for it.

You know you're an Arizona native when you have to look up "mass transit" in the dictionary.