Category Archives: Quote of the Day

St. Peter's Square, Vatican City

The outstanding event of modern times was the failure of religious belief to disappear.  For many millions, especially in the advanced nations, religion ceased to play much or any part in their lives, and the ways in which the vacuum thus lost was filled, by fascism, Nazism and Communism, by attempts at humanist utopianism, by eugenics or health politics, by the ideologies of sexual liberation, race politics and environmental politics, form much of the substance of the history of our century.  But for many more millions—for the overwhelmimg majority of the human race, in fact—religion continued to be a huge dimension in their lives.

      —Paul Johnson, in his book Modern Times, about the history of the 20th Century

It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who had first announced that human beings could be transformed for the better by the political process, and that the agency of change, the creator of what he termed the “new man”, would be the state, and the self-appointed benefactors who controlled it for the good of all.  In the twentieth century his theory was finally put to the test, on a colassal scale, and tested to destruction.

                    —Paul Johnson in Modern Times (1991 revised edition)