226 Quotes by Paul Johnson

You know you’re an Arizona native when you have to look up “mass transit” in the dictionary.

The word ‘meaningful’ when used today is nearly always meaningless.

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

I was very fond of Princess Diana. She used to have me over to lunch to ask my advice. I’d give her good advice, and she’d say: ‘I entirely agree. Paul, you’re so right.’ Then she’d go and do the opposite.

Like Rousseau, he loved humanity in general but was often cruel to human beings in particular.

I prefer to think in torment than not to be able to think clearly.

The Koheleth, the writer of Ecclesiastes, shows himself torn between new foreign ideas and his inherited piety, between the critical spirit and conservatism. The impact of Hellenization on educated Jews was in many ways similar to the impact of the enlightenment on the eighteenth-century ghetto. It woke the Temple-state from its enchanted sleep. It was a destabilizing force spiritually and, above all, it was a secularizing, materialistic force.

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

The Japanese conquest of Manchuria and their full-scale invasion of China in 1937 led to clashes on the badly mapped Soviet-Manchurian frontier. Some of these were serious and involved large-scale tank battles, which the Russians, under Marshal Zhukov, won.