Paul Johnson Quotes

This culture-contempt on the Greek side, and the love-hate which some educated Jews had for Greek culture, were sources of constant tension.

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

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

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.

Pope Pius XII, in particular, had failed to condemn the Final Solution, though he knew of it.

The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, had been issued a suicide pill, but he was also provided with a parachute and he used it.

Rousseau’s ideas brought about-he moved the political process to the very centre of human existence by making the legislator, who is also a pedagogue, into the new Messiah, capable of solving all human problems by creating New Men. ‘Everything,’ he wrote, ‘is at root dependent on politics.’ Virtue is the product of good government. ‘Vices belong less to man, than to man badly governed.’ The political process, and the new kind of state it brings into being, are the universal remedies for the ills of mankind.49 Politics will do all. Rousseau thus prepared the blueprint for the principal delusions and follies of the twentieth century.

Menashe Mautner, a disabled veteran of the First World War with a wooden leg, fell on the icy pavements of Vienna and lay there three hours vainly asking the passers-by for help. They saw his star and refused.

Jews who became socialists in the nineteenth century and who attacked the unequal distribution of wealth produced by liberal, laissez-faire capitalism were expressing in contemporary language Jewish principles which were 3,000 years old and which had become part of the instincts of the people.

The fourth concept Rousseau popularized was in some ways the most pervasive of all. When society evolves from its primitive state of nature to urban sophistication, he argued, man is corrupted: his natural selfishness, which he calls amour de soi, is transformed into a far more pernicious instinct, amour-propre, which combines vanity and self-esteem, each man rating himself by what others think of him and thus seeking to impress them by his money, strength, brains and moral superiority. His natural selfishness becomes competitive and acquisitive, and so he becomes alienated not only from other men, whom he sees as competitors and not brothers, but from himself.5 Alienation induces a psychological sickness in man, characterized by a tragic divergence between appearance and reality.

inside the angry man a fearful one cowered.

religious culture, but it is likely that increasing pressure on Indian land by the rapidly expanding Massachusetts colony was the real reason.

Mao was several inches taller than Stalin, and this was a bitter pill to swallow, since Stalin often referred to Asians as “tiny.

Simon was killed in Betar. Akiva was captured, imprisoned, finally tortured to death, the flesh torn from his body ‘by iron combs’. Dio says that of the rebels ‘very few were saved’. The Roman vengeance was awe-inspiring. Fifty forts where the rebels had put up resistance were destroyed and 985 towns, villages and agricultural settlements. Dio says 580,000 Jews died in the fighting ‘and countless numbers of starvation, fire and the sword. Nearly the entire land of Judaea was laid waste.’.126 In the late fourth century, St Jerome reported from Bethlehem a tradition that, after the defeat, there were so many Jewish slaves for sale that the price dropped to less than a horse.

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.