226 Quotes by Paul Johnson

It would be good. Because, eventually no doubt, it will be developed.

I understand why the decision was made, but it was unfortunate that it came at a time when we were anxious to play,

So sometimes it's hard to know who's got the ball.

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.

The people of Israel were not great craftsmen, or painters, or architects. But writing was their national habit, almost their obsession. They probably produced, in sheer quantity, the greatest literature of antiquity, of which the Old Testament is only a small fragment.

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

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

Ibsen was saying to humanity: ‘Be yourselves!’ Yet in this letter he was in effect admitting that to be oneself involved the sacrifice of others. Personal liberation was at bottom self-centred and heartless.

In the last generation, with public Christianity in headlong retreat, we have caught our first, distant view of a de-Christianized world, and it is not encouraging.