Paul Johnson

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

— Paul Johnson

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

— Paul Johnson

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

— Paul Johnson

There are no inevitabilities in history

— Paul Johnson

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

— Paul Johnson

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

— Paul Johnson

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

— Paul Johnson

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

— Paul Johnson

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

— Paul Johnson

“He believed he had a unique love for humanity and had been endowed with unprecedented gifts and insights to increase its felicity.”

— Paul Johnson

“In 1924 Mao took a Chinese friend, newly arrived from Europe, to see the notorious sign in the Shanghai park, 'Chinese and…

— Paul Johnson

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

— Paul Johnson

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

— Paul Johnson

Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.

— Paul Johnson

If I see a door ajar, I push on it to see how far it will open, and if it opens wide…

— Paul Johnson

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

— Paul Johnson

“As Khrushchev put it, “He prodded the capitalist world with the tip of his bayonet.” He himself put it, “If I see…

— Paul Johnson

The planet Earth, though not threatened with destruction by man-made global warming, is by no means indestructible. There are many unpredictable events…

— Paul Johnson

Scanning the newspapers and absorbing with a mixture of incredulity and indignation the enormities they report, I conclude that what England lacks…

— Paul Johnson

“Augustine was struck by the fact, when they first met, that Ambrose read to himself, a habit unknown to the classical world:…

— Paul Johnson

Every good historian is almost by definition a revisionist. He looks at the accepted view of a particular historic episode or period…

— Paul Johnson

Germany's Angela Merkel exudes an atmosphere of elderly exhaustion and pooped-out pessimism. Britain's David Cameron, though by nature exuberant, feels he has…

— Paul Johnson

At some time in their careers, most good historians itch to write a history of the world, endeavor to discover what makes…

— Paul Johnson

In all its myriad manifestations, the language of anti-Semitism through the ages is a dictionary of non-sequiturs and antonyms, a thesaurus of…

— Paul Johnson

“How could the Christian Church, apparently quite willingly, accommodate this weird megalomaniac [Constantine] in it's theocratic system? Was there a conscious bargain?…

— Paul Johnson

“Brecht’s ‘basic laxity’ was one reason why, apart from his satellites and those tied to him by party bonds, he was generally…

— Paul Johnson

“His (Lenin's)humanitarianism was a very abstract passion. It embraced humanity in general but he seems to have had little love for, or…

— Paul Johnson

In the past, the U.S. has shown its capacity to reinvent its gifts for leadership. During the 1970s, in the aftermath of…

— Paul Johnson

“If the decline of Christianity created the modern political zealot - and his crimes - so the evaporation of religious faith among…

— Paul Johnson

“Virtue is the product of good government. ‘Vices belong less to man, than to man badly governed.’ The political process, and the…

— Paul Johnson

Like many physical diseases, anti-Semitism is highly infectious, and can become endemic in certain localities and societies. Though a disease of the…

— Paul Johnson

“Partly by accident, partly by instinct, partly by deliberate contrivance, he was the first intellectual systematically to exploit the guilt of the…

— 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…

— Paul Johnson

“The whole stress of Washington’s presidency, underlined by his farewell, was on the absolute necessity to obey the Constitution. As he said…

— Paul Johnson

“Men are excessively ruthless and cruel not as a rule out of malice but from outraged righteousness. How much more is this…

— Paul Johnson

“This was all very well: Columbanus's success indicates the appeal of his mission. But his activities, for the first time, brought the…

— Paul Johnson

“Much of Sartre’s time in the 1960s was spent travelling in China and the Third World, a term invented by the geographer…

— Paul Johnson

“Marx wrote about finance and industry all his life but he only knew two people connected with financial and industrial processes. One…

— Paul Johnson

“The Salem [witch] trials…can be seen as an example of the propensity of the American people to be convulsed by spasms of…

— Paul Johnson

“Still more central to his anger and frustration, and lying perhaps at the very roots of his hatred for the capitalist system,…

— Paul Johnson