Top 80 Paul Johnson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.”

— Paul Johnson

2. “Euphemism is a human device to conceal the horrors of reality.”

— Paul Johnson

3. “The Second World War took place not so much because no one won the First, but because the Versailles Treaty did not acknowledge this truth.”

— Paul Johnson

4. “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.”

— Paul Johnson

5. “The writer learns to write, in the last resort, only by writing. He must get words onto paper even if he is dissatisfied with them.”

— Paul Johnson

6. “Democracy has many enemies, and the terrorist is only one of them.”

— Paul Johnson

7. “Next to courage, willpower is the most important thing in politics.”

— Paul Johnson

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

— Paul Johnson

9. “It takes less than a decade for today’s luxury to become a universal necessity.”

— Paul Johnson

10. “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.”

— Paul Johnson

11. “The most evil person I ever met was a toss-up between Pablo Picasso and the publisher-crook Robert Maxwell.”

— Paul Johnson

12. “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.”

— Paul Johnson

13. “If you depart from moral absolutes, you go into a bottomless pit. Communism and Nazism were catastrophic evils which both derived from moral relativism. Their differences were minor compared to their similarities.”

— Paul Johnson

14. “I’ve been having an affair, but I still believe in family values.”

— Paul Johnson

15. “As the CIA and KGB, like God and Satan, fight Miltonic battles across five continents...”

— Paul Johnson

16. “John Major is what he is: a man from nowhere, going nowhere, heading for a well-merited obscurity as fast as his mediocre talents can carry him.”

— Paul Johnson

17. “Descartes’ dictum: ‘There is nothing so absurd or incredible that it has not been asserted by one philosopher or another.”

— Paul Johnson

18. “Hence the Jews were above all historians, and the Bible is essentially a historical work from start to finish. The Jews developed the power to write terse and dramatic historical narrative half a millennium before the Greeks, and because they constantly added to their historical records they developed a deep sense of historical perspective which the Greeks never attained.”

— Paul Johnson

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

— Paul Johnson

20. “Every good historian is almost by definition a revisionist. He looks at the accepted view of a particular historic episode or period with a very critical eye.”

— Paul Johnson

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

— Paul Johnson

22. “I don’t write huge books any more. I used to write 1,000 printed pages, but now I write short books. I did one on Napoleon, 50,000 words – enjoyed doing that. He was a baddie. I did one on Churchill, which was a bestseller in New York, I’m glad to say. 50,000 words. He was a goodie.”

— Paul Johnson

23. “The most socially subversive institution of our time is the one-parent family.”

— Paul Johnson

24. “Global warming, like Marxism, is a political theory of actions, demanding compliance with its rules.”

— Paul Johnson

25. “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.”

— Paul Johnson

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

— Paul Johnson

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

— Paul Johnson

28. “At some time in their careers, most good historians itch to write a history of the world, endeavor to discover what makes humanity the most destructive and creative of species.”

— Paul Johnson

29. “As a child I found railroad stations exciting, mysterious, and even beautiful, as indeed they often were.”

— Paul Johnson

30. “I like that lady – Sarah Palin. She’s great. I like the cut of her jib.”

— Paul Johnson

31. “Not interested in food or drink, he ate his meals, if he had any choice in the matter, in ten minutes and never caroused. No one ever saw him drunk.”

— Paul Johnson

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

— Paul Johnson

33. “Human beings are infinitely worth studying, especially the peculiarities that often go along with outstanding gifts.”

— Paul Johnson

34. “For me this is the vital litmus test: no intellectual society can flourish where a Jew feels even slightly uneasy.”

— Paul Johnson

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

— Paul Johnson

36. “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.”

— Paul Johnson

37. “There are no inevitabilities in history.”

— Paul Johnson

38. “Long periods of recession, which tend to be self-perpetuating, are usually ended by war, or by preparations for it.”

— Paul Johnson

39. “If I see a door ajar, I push on it to see how far it will open, and if it opens wide I go through it.”

— Paul Johnson

40. “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.”

— Paul Johnson

41. “Mr. Churchill, sir, to what do you attribute your success in life?” Without pause or hesitation, he replied: “Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.” He.”

— Paul Johnson

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

— Paul Johnson

43. “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.”

— Paul Johnson

44. “A capitalist economy hums when leading businessmen are bubbling with animal spirits and are prepared to sink their money into risky ventures.”

— Paul Johnson

45. “One modern academic lists Rousseau’s shortcomings as follows: he was a ‘masochist, exhibitionist, neurasthenic, hypochondriac, onanist, latent homosexual afflicted by the typical urge for repeated displacements, incapable of normal or parental affection, incipient paranoiac, narcissistic introvert rendered unsocial by his illness, filled with guilt feelings, pathologically timid, a kleptomaniac, infantilist, irritable and miserly’.”

— Paul Johnson

46. “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.”

— Paul Johnson

47. “Indeed, there are recurrent hints in the Bible that the Israelites had feelings of guilt about taking the Canaanites’ land,147 a curious adumbration of Israeli twinges about homeless Palestinian Arabs in the late twentieth century. The Israelites, however, hid any remorse in the belief that the conquest was a pious act: it is ‘because of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord is driving them out before you’.”

— Paul Johnson

48. “The General Will is always righteous.”

— Paul Johnson

49. “It is one of the many ironies of this period that, at a time when the intelligentsia were excoriating Mellon for tax-evasion, and contrasting the smooth-running Soviet planned economy with the breakdown in America, he was secretly exploiting the frantic necessities of the Soviet leaders to form the basis of one of America’s most splendid public collections.”

— Paul Johnson

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

— Paul Johnson