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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
Word
Used
Today
Always
Meaningless
Nearly
Meaningful

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.
Paul Johnson
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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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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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As the CIA and KGB, like God and Satan, fight Miltonic battles across five continents.
Paul Johnson
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If we want foxes, to observe and delight in, we must have hunting.
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Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.
Paul Johnson
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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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Democracy has many enemies, and the terrorist is only one of them.
Paul Johnson
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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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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.
Paul Johnson
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You know you're an Arizona native when you have to look up mass transit in the dictionary.
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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There are no inevitabilities in history
Paul Johnson
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I've been having an affair, but I still believe in family values.
Paul Johnson
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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
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It takes less than a decade for today's luxury to become a universal necessity.
Paul Johnson
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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
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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
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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