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181 " So early 19th-century China, with its rapidly increasing population, had many of the symptoms of underdeveloped Third World societies today, especially an overproduction of literate men (not technocrats or scientists) in relation to the capacity of the political and economic system to employ them usefully. "
― Paul Johnson , The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830
182 " The notion that gentiles and Jews could both subscribe to Christianity as a sort of super-religion could not survive the events of 66-70, which effectively destroyed the old Christian-Jewish church of Jerusalem.129 Most of its members must have perished. The survivors scattered. Their tradition ceased in any way to be mainstream Christianity and survived merely as a lowly sect, the Ebionites, eventually declared heretical. "
― Paul Johnson , A History of the Jews
183 " their children and wives to be cut before their eyes’.63 There is a reference to this sadistic episode in one of the Qumran scrolls: ‘the lion of wrath…when he hangs men up alive’. "
184 " This ‘suffering servant’ of God would be ‘taken from prison and from judgment’, ‘brought as a lamb to the slaughter’, be buried with the wicked and ‘numbered with the transgressors’. This Messiah was not a mob leader or democrat or guerrilla chieftain, let alone a future earthly king and world sovereign. He was, rather, a theologian and sacrificial victim, "
185 " Between 1945 and 1951 a total of 5,025 Nazis were convicted, 806 being sentenced to death. But in only 486 cases was the death sentence carried out. "
186 " Einstein was not a practising Jew, but he acknowledged a God. He believed passionately in absolute standards of right and wrong. His professional life was devoted to the quest not only for truth but for certitude. He insisted the world could be divided into subjective and objective spheres, and that one must be able to make precise statements about the objective portion. "
― Paul Johnson , Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties
187 " In late antiquity, Judaic scholars organized the laws into 613 commandments, consisting of 248 mandatory commandments and 365 prohibitions. "
188 " Alf, if you were walking down Piccadilly, and you saw Picasso walking in front of you, what would you do? ’ ‘Kick his arse, Mr. Churchill.’ ‘Quite right, Alf. "
― Paul Johnson , Churchill
189 " Warfare, from being a means to an end, became an end in itself, and Bonaparte, having once unsheathed his sword, found it impossible to lay it down for long. He ended by being no nearer his goal, and no safer, than his last victory—thus inviting inevitable nemesis. "
― Paul Johnson , Napoleon: A Life
190 " There is nothing in the early church, other than its Christology, which was not adumbrated in Judaism. "
191 " The ancient writers were not merely convinced of Moses’ existence: they saw him as one of the formative figures of world history. "
192 " Bonaparte was a man who, when he was in his cradle, had been given by the Good Fairy gifts beyond the imagination of most men. But she had denied him things that most people, however humble, take for granted—the ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood, or right and wrong. "
193 " He wrote to Born: ‘You believe in a God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists and which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture. "
194 " The Bible is not a work of reason, it is a work of history, dealing with what are to us mysterious and even inexplicable events. It is concerned with the momentous choices which it pleased God to make. "
195 " There were as many Jews as Greeks in the Roman empire, and a higher proportion of them were literate. "
196 " Rosicrucians "
― Paul Johnson , Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky
197 " The truth seems to be that Jesus was part of a rapidly developing argument within the pious Jewish community, which included Pharisees of various tendencies. "
198 " In 133 BC the Seleucid ruler Antiochus Sidetes was told by his advisers that Jerusalem should be destroyed and the Jewish people annihilated because they were the only people on earth who refused to associate with the rest of humanity. "
199 " The Russian regime was “an animal form of barbarism,” maintained by “bloody and wholesale butcheries and murders, carried out by Chinese-style executions and armoured cars. "
200 " It was an axiom of Zionism that a state must come into existence where Jews could feel safe. How could they feel safe if they did not, in some fundamental sense, control it? That meant a unitary, not a binary, system; not power-sharing but Jewish rule. "