Modern Times Quotes

“Men are excessively ruthless and cruel not as a rule out of malice but from outraged righteousness. How much more is this true of legally constituted states, invested with all this seeming moral authority of parliaments and congresses and courts of justice! The destructive capacity of an individual, however vicious, is small; of the state, however well-intentioned, almost limitless. Expand the state and the destructive capacity necessarily expands too. Collective righteousness is far more ungovernable than any individual pursuit of revenge. That was a point well understood by Woodrow Wilson, who warned: 'Once lead this people into war and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times : A History of the World from the 1920s to the Year 2000

“A Stalin functionary admitted, "Innocent people were arrested: naturally - otherwise no one would be frightened. If people, he said, were arrested only for specific misdemeanours, all the others would feel safe and so become ripe for treason.”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times : A History of the World from the 1920s to the Year 2000

“In 1924 Mao took a Chinese friend, newly arrived from Europe, to see the notorious sign in the Shanghai park, 'Chinese and Dogs Not Allowed'.”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times : A History of the World from the 1920s to the Year 2000

“His (Lenin's)humanitarianism was a very abstract passion. It embraced humanity in general but he seems to have had little love for, or even interest in, humanity in particular. He saw the people with whom he dealt, his comrades, not as individuals but as receptacles for his ideas. On that basis, and no other, they were judged. He judged man not by their moral qualities but by their views, or rather the degree to which they accepted his.”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times : A History of the World from the 1920s to the Year 2000

“If the decline of Christianity created the modern political zealot - and his crimes - so the evaporation of religious faith among the educated left a vacuum in the minds of Western intellectuals easily filled by secular superstition. There is no other explanation for the credulity with which scientists, accustomed to evaluating evidence, and writers, whose whole function was to study and criticize society, accepted the crudest Stalinist propaganda at its face value. They needed to believe; they wanted to be duped.”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times : A History of the World from the 1920s to the Year 2000

“In a real revolution, the best characters do not come to the front. A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first. Afterwards come the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time. Such are the chiefs and the leaders. You will notice that I have left out the mere rogues. The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane and devoted natures, the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement, but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims: the victims of disgust, disenchantment–often of remorse. Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured–that is the definition of revolutionary success.”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times

“Bismarck had cunningly taught the parties not to aim at national appeal but to represent interests. They remained class or sectional pressure-groups under the Republic. This was fatal, for it made the party system, and with it democratic parliamentarianism, seem a divisive rather than a unifying factor. Worse: it meant the parties never produced a leader who appealed beyond the narrow limits of his own following.”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times

“The war corporatism of 1917 began one of the great continuities of modern American history, sometimes Underground, sometimes on the surface, which culminated in the vast welfare state which Lyndon Johnson brought into being in the late 1960s.”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times

“It is a commonplace that men are excessively ruthless and cruel not as a rule out of avowed malice but from outraged righteousness. How much more is this true of legally constituted states, invested with all the seeming moral authority of parliaments and congresses and courts of justice! The destructive capacity of the individual, however vicious, is small; of the state, however well-intentioned, almost limitless.”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times

“The senses, whose empirical perceptions shaped our ideas of time and distance, right and wrong, law and justice, and the nature of man’s behaviour in society, were not to be trusted.”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times

“the public response to relativity was one of the principal formative influences on the course of twentieth-century history. It formed a knife, inadvertently wielded by its author, to help cut society adrift from its traditional moorings in the faith and morals of Judeo-Christian culture.”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times

“Darwin’s notion of the survival of the fittest was a key element both in the Marxist concept of class warfare and of the racial philosophies which shaped Hitlerism.”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times

“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 cultural and political strands of change could not be separated, any more than during the turbulence of revolution and romanticism of 1790–1830. It has been noted that James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Lenin were all resident-exiles in Zurich in 1916, waiting for their time to come.”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times

“As Churchill correctly noted, the horrors he listed were perpetrated by the ‘mighty educated States’. Indeed, they were quite beyond the power of individuals, however evil. It is a commonplace that men are excessively ruthless and cruel not as a rule out of avowed malice but from outraged righteousness. How much more is this true of legally constituted states, invested with all the seeming moral authority of parliaments and congresses and courts of justice! The destructive capacity of the individual, however vicious, is small; of the state, however well-intentioned, almost limitless. Expand the state and that destructive capacity necessarily expands too, pari passu.”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times

“Einstein himself summed it up thus: ‘The “Principle of Relativity” in its widest sense is contained in the Statement: The totality of physical phenomena is of such a character that it gives no basis for the introduction of the concept of “absolute motion”; or, shorter but less precise: There is no absolute motion.”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times

“It is one of the many ironies of this period that, at a time when the intelligentsia were excoriating Mellon for tax-evasion, and contrasting the smooth-running Soviet planned economy with the breakdown in America, he was secretly exploiting the frantic necessities of the Soviet leaders to form the basis of one of America's most splendid public collections”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times : A History of the World from the 1920s to the Year 2000

“But some turned out to be more human than others. ‘Zambian humanism’, he declared, ‘aims at eradicating all evil tendencies in Man … the attainment of human perfection’, by ridding society of ‘negative human inclinations such as selfishness, greed, hypocrisy, individualism, laziness, racism, tribalism, provincialism, nationalism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, fascism, poverty, diseases, ignorance and exploitation of man by man’.”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times

“The effect of the Great War was enormously to increase the size, and therefore the destructive capacity and propensity to oppress, of the state.”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times

“Marx, Freud, Einstein all conveyed the same message to the 1920s: the world was not what it seemed.”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times

“The nineteenth century saw the climax of the philosophy of personal responsibility–the notion that each of us is individually accountable for our actions–which was the joint heritage of Judeo-Christianity and the classical world.”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times

“Two decades later, the notion of regarding dissent as a form of mental sickness, suitable for compulsory hospitalization, was to blossom in the Soviet Union into a new form of political repression.”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times

“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.”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times

“Elgar was writing the final bars of his Cello Concerto, his last major work, which conveys better than any words the unappeasable sadness of those days.”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times: A History of the World From the 1920s to the Year 2000

“It is a myth that European youth was ruthlessly sacrificed in 1914 by selfish and cynical age. The speeches of pre-war politicians were crammed with appeals to youth. Youth movements were a European phenomenon, especially in Germany where 25,000 members of the Wandervögel clubs hiked, strummed guitars, protested about pollution and the growth of cities, and damned the old. Opinion-formers like Max Weber and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck demanded that youth be brought to the helm. The nation, wrote Bruck, ‘needs a change of blood, an insurrection of the sons against the fathers, a substitution of the old by the young’.52 All over Europe, sociologists were assiduously studying youth to find out what it thought and wanted. And of course what youth wanted was war. The first pampered ‘youth generation’ went enthusiastically to a war which their elders, almost without exception, accepted with horror or fatalistic despair. Among articulate middle-class youth it was, at the outset at least, the most popular war in history. They dropped their guitars and seized their rifles.”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times: A History of the World From the 1920s to the Year 2000

“Further West, in Britain, Joseph Conrad (himself an Easterner) had been the only major writer to reflect this pessimism, working it into a whole series of striking novels: Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), Under Western Eyes (1911), Victory (1915). These despairing political sermons, in the guise of fiction, preached the message Thomas Mann was to deliver to central Europe in 1924 with The Magic Mountain, as Mann himself acknowledged in the preface he wrote to the German translation of The Secret Agent two years later. For Conrad the war merely confirmed the irremediable nature of man’s predicament. From the perspective of sixty years later it must be said that Conrad is the only substantial writer of the time whose vision remains clear and true in every particular. He dismissed Marxism as malevolent nonsense, certain to generate monstrous tyranny; Freud’s ideas were nothing more than ‘a kind of magic show’. The war had demonstrated human frailty but otherwise would resolve nothing, generate nothing. Giant plans of reform, panaceas, all ‘solutions’, were illusory.”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times: A History of the World From the 1920s to the Year 2000

“But until the twentieth century there were few references of any kind to bushido. Some doubted its very existence. Professor Hall Chamberlain, in an essay The Invention of a New Religion, published in 1912, wrote: ‘Bushido, as an institution or a code of rules, has never existed. The accounts given of it have been fabricated out of whole cloth, chiefly for foreign consumption… Bushido was unknown until a decade or so ago.’12 It may have been a series of religious exercises, accessible to very few. At all events in the 1920s it was popularized as a code of military honour, identified with extreme nationalism and militarism, and became the justification for the most grotesque practices, first the murder of individuals, later mass-cruelty and slaughter. The ‘knights of bushido’ were the militant leadership of totalitarian Shintoism, the equivalent, in this oriental setting, of the ‘vanguard élites’ of Lenin and Mussolini, the blackshirts and brownshirts and Chekists of Europe.”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times

“The French were not racist in the German sense, since a certain cosmopolitanism was a corollary of their proprietory rights over civilization. But they were extraordinarily susceptible to weird racial theories, which they produced in abundance. Thus in 1915 Dr Edgar Bérillon ‘discovered’ that Germans had intestines nine feet longer than other humans, which made them prone to ‘polychesia’ and bromidrosis (excessive defecation and body-smells).”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times

“A devoted cleric, he [Lenin] argued, is far more influential than an egotistical and immoral one. [p. 51]”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties

“With the onset of the war, each belligerent eagerly scanned its competitors and allies for aspects of state management and intervention in the war economy which could be imitated. The capitalist sectors, appeased by enormous profits and inspired no doubt also by patriotism, raised no objections. The result was a qualitative and quantitative expansion of the role of the state which has never been fully reversed–for though wartime arrangements were sometimes abandoned with peace, in virtually every case they were eventually adopted again, usually permanently.”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times