Paul Johnson QUOTES

61 " the emperor’s two chief ministers were detected in a plan to replace Bonaparte by Murat, the emperor subjected Talleyrand to a lengthy and public dressing down in front of an astonished court. His parade-ground language was shocking, as in his tirade to Whitworth—he called Talleyrand “merde en bas-de-soie” (a shit in silk stockings)—and from that day to this, no one knows whether Bonaparte’s loss of temper was deliberate or not. "

― Paul Johnson , Napoleon: A Life

63 " Chaucer saw French and Italian poetry not so much as models to imitate but as verbal shop windows from which he could steal words that as yet had no English equivalents. He thus added over 1,000 words to our language—that is, these words cannot be found in earlier writers.21 They included these: jubilee, administration, secret, voluptuousness, novelty, digestion, persuasion, erect, moisture, galaxy, philosophical, policy, tranquillity. These are mostly polysyllabic, weighty words, used by scholars and professional men. "

― Paul Johnson , Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney

65 " The Japanese conquest of Manchuria and their full-scale invasion of China in 1937 led to clashes on the badly mapped Soviet-Manchurian frontier. Some of these were serious and involved large-scale tank battles, which the Russians, under Marshal Zhukov, won. "

― Paul Johnson , Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer (Icons)

67 " The people of Israel were not great craftsmen, or painters, or architects. But writing was their national habit, almost their obsession. They probably produced, in sheer quantity, the greatest literature of antiquity, of which the Old Testament is only a small fragment. "

― Paul Johnson , A History of the Jews

69 " With the decline of clerical power in the eighteenth century, a new kind of mentor emerged to fill the vacuum and capture the ear of society. The secular intellectual might be deist, sceptic or atheist. But he was just as ready as any pontiff or presbyter to tell mankind how to conduct its affairs. He proclaimed, from the start, a special devotion to the interests of humanity and an evangelical duty to advance them by his teaching. He brought to this self-appointed task a far more radical approach than his clerical predecessors. "

― Paul Johnson , Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

71 " Like Rousseau, he loved humanity in general but was often cruel to human beings in particular. "

― Paul Johnson , Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

73 " To be an American citizen is one of the world’s great prizes. "

― Paul Johnson , Eisenhower: A Life

75 " Ike never needlessly grudged time for a photo session, but he did insist that meetings with individual academics should have a specific and useful purpose. He did on one occasion observe that his academic colleagues tended “to need more time to come to the point than people in the Army,” and he went on the record with this definition of an intellectual: “A man who takes more words than is necessary to tell more than he knows. "

― Paul Johnson , Eisenhower: A Life

77 " The inquiry begins with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), who was the first of the modern intellectuals, their archetype and in many ways the most influential of them all. "

― Paul Johnson , Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

79 " Sombart ignored the powerful mystical element in Judaism. He refused to recognize, as did Weber, that wherever these religious systems, including Judaism, were at their most powerful and authoritarian, commerce did not flourish. Jewish businessmen, like Calvinist ones, tended to operate most successfully when they had left their traditional religious environment and had moved to fresh pastures. "

― Paul Johnson , A History of the Jews