Quote of the day—Paul Johnson

The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.

Paul Johnson
1980
The Recovery of Freedom by Paul Johnson
[Via Thomas Sowell.

My web wanderings for the original source resulted in stumbling across this web page. I now have Intellectuals in my Audible library.—Joe]

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5 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Paul Johnson

  1. And here we go again, Mabel.
    Bored intellectualism, and trying to justify ones job, have lead humans to more misery than all natural disasters put together.
    To me the question is; Was this a feature in the original design? If so then we can never truly solve our problems. And we need to adjust ourselves accordingly.
    It would seem one of the constants in the world is human failure.
    Should we not demand of all leading us to answer that question before action is taken. What if it fails?

    • They just redefine “success” and “failure” along the way, as it suits them. “You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette” and so on. In his own mind and in the minds of his Mesmerized followers, the arrogant “leader” cannot fail. He can only be failed by others.

  2. Hear, hear!

    And going back to a recent post on here, if people lived longer we’d have large populations of the survivors of all the 20th Century purges, who would know all the steps that led their countries into darkness, and they could warn us.

    But on the other hand, the young and the arrogant would never listen to them. Attractive and empowering slogans like, “Out with the old! In with the new!”, “Social Justice Now!” and, “Climate Justice!” would resonate and resound throughout the world just as they do now. The purges of the past would only serve as models, building blocks for the future, that the next purge might be carried out more effectively and completely.

    When deception and transgression of God’s perfect law of liberty are the basis for your power structure, and for your wealth, reputation, status and station, the one thing that absolutely cannot be tolerated is the truth. Truth rapidly becomes public enemy number one. Anyone who even hints at the truth is anathema and must be put down for the sake of “Peace”, “Unity” and “Safety”.

    http://ultimak.com/Left-Speak.htm#Peace

    http://ultimak.com/Left-Speak.htm#Unityhttp://ultimak.com/Left-Speak.htm#Safety

    • Certainly true for Leftists. Talk to them, and you will find that most have no concept of the past. Everything is New to them, so nothing to learn about prior attempts at creating Utopia.

      This problem is bolstered by the deliberate actions of the teachers in our schools, to water down or lie about what has happened years or decades or centuries ago. The Progressives made this an important effort when they decided to take control of our schools over a century ago. They wanted dumb, ignorant citizens to fill the factories of the Industrial Revolution. They certainly succeeded in that effort!

      Young people these days are astoundingly stupid, and I find it frightening for the future. They not only don’t know anything, they don’t seem able to learn anything useful after more than a decade of indoctrination in what are laughingly called “schools”.

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