A Quote by Paul Johnson

For me this is the vital litmus test: no intellectual society can flourish where a Jew feels even slightly uneasy. — © Paul Johnson
For me this is the vital litmus test: no intellectual society can flourish where a Jew feels even slightly uneasy.
My music is - there's no litmus test, there's no political litmus test for listening to it - but I am never going to compromise one iota to satisfy with someone who's uncomfortable with the ideas I feel in my heart.
I don't love the term gatekeeper because it feels like there's a negative connotation attached to it, so I prefer to go with litmus test.
Women and gay people are the litmus test of whether a society is democratic and respecting human rights. We are the canaries in the mine.
Mind, I am not preaching anything contrary to accepted morality. I am not advocating free love in this or any other case. Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and madness.
Test pilots have a litmus test for evaluating problems. When something goes wrong, they ask, "Is this thing still flying?" If the answer is yes, then there's no immediate danger, no need to overreact.
Organizer is kind of a grand term for what I was doing. I answered an ad that the Presbyterian Church of Chicago put up on college campuses. I was at the University of Kansas, and it's somewhat relevant to my life and work that I'm a Jew. But they weren't doing a religious litmus test. They wanted energetic, civil-rights-committed college students to come help them run some summer programs.
If freedom is to flourish the philosophic foundations of a free society must be kept a living intellectual issue and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of the liveliest minds.
What we are learning around the world is that if women are healthy and educated, their families will flourish. If women are free from violence, their families will flourish. If women have a chance to work and earn as full and equal partners in society, their families will flourish. And when families flourish, communities and nations do as well.
Compassion is the litmus test.
Growing up in Britain as a rather loose Jew, the two things that didn't belong together were freedom and religious intensity. In America, they do. The Founding Fathers made a bet that if you didn't force everyone to profess religion in their own particular way, you could protect intellectual freedom, and religion would flourish.
In school they told me I was a Jew, "a filthy Jew." At first I asked myself what exactly that was. But then I began to understand. I was a Jew, I was a member of the Jewish faith, the Jewish community. One time, when I was giving a reading at a school, someone asked me: "If it was so dangerous to be Jewish, why didn't you convert to Christianity?" My response was: "It's not as easy you think. When you're a Jew, you're a Jew.
If you came from Mars and tried to analyse British or American society through novels, you'd think our society was preponderantly full of middle-aged, slightly alcoholic, middle-class, intellectual men, most of whom are divorced from their families and have nothing to do with children.
I love theatre because it's just me and the audience. It's the litmus test in acting, to be able to sustain a performance over one, two or three hours.
A real litmus test for me is how people treat someone who is waiting on them. That's a dealbreaker for me.If I were on the verge of getting into a serious relationship and I saw that person be mean to a waiter... I'm out.
A crucial contribution to the ideological argument ...it provides a vital part of the intellectual manifesto on which the battle for a better society can be fought
How many members of Congress go face the people in a town meeting and are prepared to answer questions from the floor. That to me is the real litmus test.
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