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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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Paul Johnson
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: November 2
Editor
Historian
Journalist
Speechwriter
Writer
Manchester
England
Paul Bede Johnson
Become
Today
Decade
Necessity
Luxury
Decades
Universal
Takes
Less

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I like that lady - Sarah Palin. She's great. I like the cut of her jib.
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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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Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.
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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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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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The word 'meaningful' when used today is nearly always meaningless.
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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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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.
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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 we want foxes, to observe and delight in, we must have hunting.
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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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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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The most evil person I ever met was a toss-up between Pablo Picasso and the publisher-crook Robert Maxwell.
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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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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.
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This book is dedicated to the people of America--strong, outspoken, intense in their convictions, sometimes wrong-headed but always generous and brave, with a passion for justice no nation has ever matched.
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Long periods of recession, which tend to be self-perpetuating, are usually ended by war, or by preparations for it.
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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.
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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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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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