Paul Johnson Quotes

inside the angry man a fearful one cowered.

The evil of competition, as he saw it, which destroys man’s inborn communal sense and encourages all his most evil traits, including his desire to exploit others, led Rousseau to distrust private property, as the source of social crime.

Moreover, if the Jews, by accepting the enlightenment, were to forfeit the particular claims of Judaism, it was by no means certain that they would get a quiet life in return. The country which came closest to Mendelssohn’s ideal was the United States, where the notions of the enlightenment rested on a solid basis of English parliamentarianism and tolerant religious pluralism. The very year Mendelssohn was writing Jerusalem, Thomas Jefferson, in Notes on Virginia (1782), argued that the existence of a variety of sensible, ethical religions was the best guarantee of material and spiritual progress, and of human freedom.

He is recorded to have laughed only once, at a picnic with Ernst Jünger in the Harz Mountains. Jünger leaned over to pick up a sauerkraut and sausage roll, and his lederhosen split with a tremendous crack. Heidegger let out a shout of glee, but immediately checked himself, “and his facial expression reverted to its habitual ferocity.

The article by Roald Dahl in the August Issue of Literary Review is, in my view, the most disgraceful item to appear in a respectable British publication for a very, long time. Indeed 1 cannot recall anything like it ... As a rule, in a civilised country like Britain, those who hate the Israelis, or the Jews in general, are careful to mask their views behind a screen of anti-Zionism, thus in theory giving their collective condemnation a political rather than a racial rationale. Dahl is a different case. He is too reckless, or too angry, or too confident in getting away with it, to take such precautions.

Again, the point was echoed powerfully and paradoxically by the heretic Jew, St Paul, in the dramatic opening to his First Epistle to the Corinthians, when he quotes the Lord, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent’; and he adds, ‘Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men…[therefore] God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.

Those who control a people’s opinions control its actions.’ Such control is established by treating citizens, from infancy, as children of the State,

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

I have just finished what is, without doubt, the nastiest book I have ever read. It is a new novel entitled Dr. No and the author is Mr Ian Fleming. ... By the time I was a third of the way through, I had to suppress a strong impulse to throw the thing away, and only continued reading because I realised that here was a social phenomenon of some importance.
There are three basic ingredients in Dr No, all unhealthy, all thoroughly English: the sadism of a schoolboy bully, the mechanical, two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent, and the crude, snob-cravings of a suburban adult. Mr Fleming has no literary skill, the construction of the book is chaotic, and entire incidents and situations are inserted, and then forgotten in a haphazard manner. But the three ingredients are manufactured and blended with deliberate, professional precision ...
Our curious post-war society, with its obsessive interest in debutantes, its cult of U and non-U, its working-class graduates educated into snobbery by the welfare state, is a soft market for Mr Fleming's poison. ...

Christians commit crimes with their hands, the Jews use their reason.’ A typical Jewish big-time criminal was Jacob ‘Greasy Thumb’ Guzik (1887-1956), who was Al Capone’s bookkeeper and treasurer. Another was Arnold Rothstein (1882-1928), the pioneer of big business crime, who is portrayed as ‘The Brain’ in Damon Runyon’s stories, and by Scott Fitzgerald as Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby. Then there was Meyer Lansky, who created and lost a gambling empire and had his application for Israeli citizenship turned down in 1971.

It was part of Rousseau’s vanity that he believed himself incapable of base emotions. ‘I feel too superior to hate.’ ‘I love myself too much to hate anybody.

Isaiah not only wrote but preached in the Temple. He was not, however, talking of a religion of official cult, of endless sacrifices and priestly ceremonies, but of an ethical religion of the heart: he was reaching over the heads of the priests to the people.

Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Metatron had special alphabets, derived from ancient cuneiform writing or obsolete Hebraic scripts, the letters often containing small circles which looked like eyes. These letters were put on amulets and other charms to magic away devils. Or they could be driven off by pronouncing special combinations of letters. One such was the name of the devil in Aramaic, which was given as abracadabra; another was shabriri, after the devil of blindness.

When Bonaparte ordered the pope to come to Paris to crown him as emperor, the Italian party among the cardinals overruled the Austrian party and encouraged him to accept. The argument went: “After all, we are imposing an Italian family on the barbarians, to govern them. We are revenging ourselves on the Gauls.” But this soon became a bad joke.

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