The Birth of the Modern Quotes

“This was the point at which north and south began to bifurcate decisively and indeed at which the term the South came into general parlance. The southern apologists were still, in their hearts, ashamed of slavery. That is why they used a euphemism. To them, it was not slavery—a word they never spoke, if possible—but “the peculiar institution.” The use of euphemisms was to become an outstanding characteristic of the modern world which was being born, and nowhere was it employed more assiduously than in the South’s defense of unfree labor.”
― Paul Johnson, The Birth Of The Modern: World Society 1815-1830

“that worst of all systems: a society run by its intelligentsia, a cathedocracy ruled from the scholar’s chair.”
― Paul Johnson, The Birth Of The Modern: World Society 1815-1830

“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

“This huge growth in the cotton industry, rising at 7 percent compound annually, soon made cotton America’s largest export trade and perhaps the biggest single source of the country’s growing wealth. It also created “the South” as a special phenomenon, a culture, a cast of mind.”
― Paul Johnson, The Birth Of The Modern: World Society 1815-1830