Quotes from Paul Johnson

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.

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.

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

The freedom enjoyed in Western society under the rule of law and constitutional government explains both the quality of its civilization and its wealth.

It would be wrong to say I enjoy having rows, because that would be un-Christian. If people attack me, then I respond, or if they do very wicked things. Then they must be brought to book.

In the long term, it is desirable that the human race, faced with the prospect of extinction on Earth, should prepare an escape route for itself to another inhabitable planet.

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

Margaret Thatcher had more impact on the world than any woman ruler since Catherine the Great of Russia. Not only did she turn around - decisively - the British economy in the 1980s, she also saw her methods copied in more than 50 countries.

In all its myriad manifestations, the language of anti-Semitism through the ages is a dictionary of non-sequiturs and antonyms, a thesaurus of illogic and inconsistency.

One of the categories of people I don't like much are intellectuals. People say, 'Oh, you're an intellectual,' and I say, 'No!' What is an intellectual? An intellectual is somebody who thinks ideas are more important than people.

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

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

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

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.

Where the quest for knowledge is relatively, and now almost absolutely, unrestrained, the public benefit will be great, especially where the certainty of the law ensures that knowledge is rewarded. This is exactly the combination that is the foundation of wealth-creation.

What strikes the historian surveying anti-Semitism worldwide over more than two millennia is its fundamental irrationality. It seems to make no sense, any more than malaria or meningitis makes sense.

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.

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

One of the marvelous things about Churchill is that whatever he was doing, whether fighting or arguing or despairing or bouncing about full of energy, jokes are never far away.

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.

The whole world depends on America ultimately, particularly Britain. And also, I love America - a marvelous country. But in a sense I don't worry about America because I think America has such huge strengths - particularly its freedom of thought and expression - that it's going to survive as a top nation for the foreseeable future.

Is there any possibility of giving international air travel, which we all need and use and hate, a touch of glamour, or even of reliable, soulless efficiency? I suspect future historians will puzzle over our failure. But by then, of course, we shall be in the age of mass space travel, with its fresh and unimaginable crop of horrors.

Indeed, the study of universities and the great men and women who have attended them leads me to think that the best of these schools are characterized not so much by what they teach and how they teach it but by the extent they provide opportunities and encouragement for students to teach themselves.

I very much wanted to be editor of the 'New Statesman!' But I never wanted to be prime minister, except maybe as a little boy.