{"author":"Paul Johnson","author_id":"Paul+Johnson","total_quotes":14,"quotes":[{"text":"Marx wrote about finance and industry all his life but he only knew two people connected with financial and industrial processes. One was his uncle in Holland, Lion Philips, a successful businessman who created what eventually became the vast Philips Electric Company. Uncle Philips' views on the whole capitalist process would have been well-informed and interesting, had Marx troubled to explore them. But he only once consulted him, on a technical matter of high finance, and though he visited Philips four times, these concerned purely personal mattes of family money. The other knowledgeable man was Engels himself. But Marx declined Engel's invitation to accompany him on a visit to a cotton mill, and so far as we know Marx never set foot in a mill, factory, mine or other industrial workplace in the whole of his life.","author":"Paul Johnson","tags":["communism","marx","marxism"],"id":16418,"author_id":"Paul+Johnson"},{"text":"Most people are resistant to ideas, especially new ones. But they are fascinated by character. Extravagance of personality is one way in which the pill can be sugared and the public induced to look at works dealing with ideas.","author":"Paul Johnson","tags":["extravagance","personality"],"id":37439,"author_id":"Paul+Johnson"},{"text":"Men are excessively ruthless and cruel not as a rule out of malice but from outraged righteousness. How much more is this true of legally constituted states, invested with all this seeming moral authority of parliaments and congresses and courts of justice! The destructive capacity of an individual, however vicious, is small; of the state, however well-intentioned, almost limitless. Expand the state and the destructive capacity necessarily expands too. Collective righteousness is far more ungovernable than any individual pursuit of revenge. That was a point well understood by Woodrow Wilson, who warned: 'Once lead this people into war and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.","author":"Paul Johnson","tags":["ity","indignation"],"id":50835,"author_id":"Paul+Johnson"},{"text":"How could the Christian Church, apparently quite willingly, accommodate this weird megalomaniac [Constantine] in it's theocratic system? Was there a conscious bargain? Which side benefited most form this unseemly marriage between church and state? Or, to put it another way, did the empire surrender to Christianity, or did Christianity prostitute itself to the empire? It is characteristic of the complexities of early Christian history that we cannot give a definite answer to this question.","author":"Paul Johnson","tags":["christianity","history"],"id":103242,"author_id":"Paul+Johnson"},{"text":"A Stalin functionary admitted, 'Innocent people were arrested: naturally - otherwise no one would be frightened. If people, he said, were arrested only for specific misdemeanours, all the others would feel safe and so become ripe for treason.","author":"Paul Johnson","tags":["fear","totalitarianism"],"id":210347,"author_id":"Paul+Johnson"},{"text":"Next to courage, willpower is the most important thing in politics.","author":"Paul Johnson","tags":["politics","important "],"id":239424,"author_id":"Paul+Johnson"},{"text":"In the past, the U.S. Has shown its capacity to reinvent its gifts for leadership. During the 1970s, in the aftermath of the Nixon abdication and the Ford and Carter presidencies, the whole nation peered into the abyss, was horrified by what it saw and elected Ronald Reagan as president, which began a national resurgence.","author":"Paul Johnson","tags":["past","nation","president "],"id":284678,"author_id":"Paul+Johnson"},{"text":"Julian recognized that the strength of the orthodox Church rested to a great extent on the imperial discrimination in its favour. According to Ammianus, he tried to atomize the Church by ending the system:.","author":"Paul Johnson","tags":["christianity","divide-and-conquer"],"id":302775,"author_id":"Paul+Johnson"},{"text":"In 1924 Mao took a Chinese friend, newly arrived from Europe, to see the notorious sign in the Shanghai park, 'Chinese and Dogs Not Allowed'.","author":"Paul Johnson","tags":["imperialism","racism"],"id":320998,"author_id":"Paul+Johnson"},{"text":"This was all very well: Columbanus's success indicates the appeal of his mission. But his activities, for the first time, brought the nature of Celtic monasticism firmly to the attention of the Church authorities -- to western bishops in general, and to the Bishop of Rome in particular. The Irish monks were not heretical. But they were plainly unorthodox. They did not look right, to begin with. They had the wrong tonsure. Rome, as was natural, had 'the tonsure of St Peter', that is, a shaven crown. Easterners had the tonsure of St Paul, totally shaven; and if they wished to take up an appointment in the West they had to wait until their rim grew before being invested. But the Celts looked like nothing on earth: they had their hair long at the back and, on the shaven front part, a half-circle of hair from one ear to the other, leaving a band across the forehead.","author":"Paul Johnson","tags":["christianity","hair"],"id":329411,"author_id":"Paul+Johnson"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":14,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}