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The word 'meaningful' when used today is nearly always meaningless.

Paul Johnson

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Paul Johnson
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: November 2
Editor
Historian
Journalist
Speechwriter
Writer
Manchester
England
Paul Bede Johnson
Nearly
Meaningful
Word
Used
Today
Always
Meaningless

More quotes by Paul Johnson

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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.
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Human beings are infinitely worth studying, especially the peculiarities that often go along with outstanding gifts.
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Nothing appeals to intellectuals more than the feeling that they represent 'the people'. Nothing, as a rule, is further from the truth
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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.
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As the CIA and KGB, like God and Satan, fight Miltonic battles across five continents.
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There are no inevitabilities in history
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Scanning the newspapers and absorbing with a mixture of incredulity and indignation the enormities they report, I conclude that what England lacks today is, quite simply, sense.
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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.
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Hell is being trapped in a night-club with the'beautiful people'and forced to live in a'luxury penthouse flat'.
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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.
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If anti-Semitism is a variety of racism, it is a most peculiar variety, with many unique characteristics. In my view as a historian, it is so peculiar that it deserves to be placed in a quite different category. I would call it an intellectual disease, a disease of the mind, extremely infectious and massively destructive.
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You know you're an Arizona native when you have to look up mass transit in the dictionary.
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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.
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I like that lady - Sarah Palin. She's great. I like the cut of her jib.
Paul Johnson
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As a child I found railroad stations exciting, mysterious, and even beautiful, as indeed they often were.
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Long periods of recession, which tend to be self-perpetuating, are usually ended by war, or by preparations for it.
Paul Johnson
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If we want foxes, to observe and delight in, we must have hunting.
Paul Johnson
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The most evil person I ever met was a toss-up between Pablo Picasso and the publisher-crook Robert Maxwell.
Paul Johnson
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Democracy has many enemies, and the terrorist is only one of them.
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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