Paul Johnson Quotes

[I]t is about time we destroyed the British class system

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.

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

Science has many uses. Its chief one, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich: ‘Kleptomania’ for example.

Una notable serie de dictámenes de los sabios dice: La salvación de la vida de un hombre tiene prioridad sobre la de una mujer [...] Cubrir la desnudez de una mujer tiene prioridad sobre la de un hombre. El rescate de una mujer tiene prioridad sobre el de un hombre. Un hombre que corre peligro de ser forzado a la sodomía tiene prioridad sobre una mujer que corre peligro de violación.

He also decided to take more notice of the “de-crypts,” based upon the Enigma code-breaking system, that Churchill, taking a great but calculated risk, began to feed him from 1942. Stalin at first dismissed them as “one of Churchill’s tricks,” but he used them at Stalingrad and found them reliable and of great value.

He was the prototype of that characteristic figure of the modern age, the Angry Young Man.

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.

The notion of ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’ was one the Jews adopted before the birth of Christ and always practised even when the community as a whole was distressed.

Disraeli never took the defensive line that Jews were no worse than other men. He thought they were better. He said he despised ‘that pernicious doctrine of modern times, the natural equality of man’. One modern historian has seen him as essentially a marrano, and there is a lot to be said for this analysis.40 He epitomized the incipient arrogance, pride and romance of the Sephardis, which he conferred on the Jews as a whole. The self-destructive Ashkenazi tendency to see Jewish sufferings in Biblical fashion as the merited consequence of Jewish sins meant absolutely nothing to him. He took the Sephardi view that Israel, being the heart of the human body, had been unfairly made to shoulder the burden of the wickedness of mankind.

It is a commonplace that men are excessively ruthless and cruel not as a rule out of avowed malice but from outraged righteousness. How much more is this true of legally constituted states, invested with all the seeming moral authority of parliaments and congresses and courts of justice! The destructive capacity of the individual, however vicious, is small; of the state, however well-intentioned, almost limitless.

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.

Karl Heinzen, who retaliated with a memorable portrait of the angry little man. He found Marx ‘intolerably dirty’, a ‘cross between a cat and an ape’; with ‘dishevelled coal-black hair and dirty yellow complexion’. It was, he said, impossible to say whether his clothes and skin were naturally mud-coloured or just filthy. He had small, fierce, malicious eyes, ‘spitting out spurts of wicked fire’; he had a habit of saying: ‘I will annihilate you.

A Stalin functionary admitted, "Innocent people were arrested: naturally - otherwise no one would be frightened. If people, he said, were arrested only for specific misdemeanours, all the others would feel safe and so become ripe for treason.

The inquiry begins with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), who was the first of the modern intellectuals, their archetype and in many ways the most influential of them all.