Jews From The United States

"[I]s Trump a philo-Semite or an anti-Semite? The answer is both. The principle that explains his seemingly contradictory outlook toward Jews is simple: Trump believes all the anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jews. But he sees those traits as admirable. To Trump, the belief that Jews are foreign interlopers who use their wealth to serve their own clannish interests is not a negative — as it is for traditional anti-Semites — but rather a positive. He wants Jews to be his attorneys and manage his money, so that he, too, can be rich. He wants them in his political corner, so that he, too, can be powerful. He wants to buy politicians, just like he thinks they do. As a man who has always stood solely for his own naked self-interest, Trump does not see the anti-Semitic conception of the self-interested Jew as a complaint, but rather a compliment. He prioritizes his needs ahead of the national interest, and so he sees the idea that Jews might do the same with themselves or with Israel as entirely natural."

"In July 2016, Trump tweeted a meme declaring that Hillary Clinton was "the most corrupt candidate ever"—with those words emblazoned over a six-pointed Jewish star superimposed on a pile of money. The meme had previously been popularized on a neo-Nazi website. Shortly before the election, Donald Trump Jr. retweeted Kevin MacDonald, America’s premier white-supremacist academic, who has argued that Jews are genetically driven to destroy Western countries, pumping the marginal malcontent into the political mainstream."

"Out of 8 billion people on the planet, there are only 16 million Jews—but far, far more anti-Semites."

"So whenever I give a lecture, somebody from the audience gets up and says, "Dr Kramer, ... how do you know how to pronounce these words?" And my answer then is as follows: If one of the dead Sumerians that Leonard Woolley dug up at Ur, if he was miraculously resurrected and came into the room and he heard me say, [speaks Sumerian], he would say: "That man Kramer, he’s doing very well; he’s pronouncing his words and I understand them. But my goodness does he have a Jewish accent.""

"The Sumerologist is one of the narrowest of specialists in the highly specialized academic halls of learning, a well-nigh perfect example of the man who "knows mostest about the leastest.""

"We each of us on our own found ways to get on without Fillory. The real world was not as fantastical and brightly colored as Fillory, but it was very distracting nonetheless, and if it didn’t contain any pegasi or giants it was absolutely teaming with girls who seemed almost as magical and dangerous. Fillory was sweet, but this world was very savory. It was easy to let Fillory go when every football match and scholarship examination and furtive kiss told you to stop fighting, forget it, let it be, leave it behind."

"Up through around twenty-five he’d never even thought about his back: it was a balanced, frictionless, self-regulating system. Now it felt like a busted gearbox into which somebody had chucked a handful of sand."

"One of the secrets Martin must have learned down below the Northern Marsh was how not to care about some things, and there was power in that, the power to live as though his actions had no consequences. It fell to us to witness the consequences, and they were ugly."

"It was funny about magic, how messy and imperfect it was. When people said something worked like magic they meant that it cost nothing and did exactly what you wanted it to. But there were lots of things magic couldn’t do. It couldn’t raise the dead. It couldn’t make you happy. He couldn’t make you good-looking. And even with the things it could do, it didn’t always do them right. And it always, always cost something."

"But not even the end of the world was going to stop Janet from being a bitch. It was the principle of the thing."

"That was magic for you, right? The thing about magic, the real kind: it didn’t make excuses, and it was never funny."

"When I look at England now I see a dead place, Rupert. A wasteland. I won’t live in a wasteland. I’d rather die in paradise."

"Hate isn’t like love, it doesn’t end. It goes on forever. You can never get to the bottom of it. And it’s so pure, so unconditional!"

"It was the sound of death, the ultimate irreversible."

"You want to know what it’s like to be a demon? Imagine knowing, always and forever, that you are right, and that everyone and everything else is wrong."

"Guy lives in a fantasy world without junk food or cars or trans fats or TV and he’s still fat. You had to admire his dedication to the cause."

"She was too tired to feel anything more, she wanted a book to do to her what books did: take away the world, slide it aside for a little bit, and let her please, please just be somewhere and somebody else."

"It was ending too soon, the way everything did, everything except Ebola viruses and really bad people like psychopaths. Those things never ended. How was that fair? Fuck it, it was stupid. Theories about life were always bullshit."

"Who the fuck is playing that shit? Janet thought. How do they even know what notes to play? Probably it was Written somewhere, probably there’s always been a big alpenhorn somewhere under glass, with a sign that says In case of Ragnarok break glass and play an E flat."

"She was starting to suspect that facing up to the nightmare of the past is what gives you the power to build your future."

"Janet stopped at the very end of the pier and looked around, hands on hips. Everything looked normal. Not a lot of apocalypse going on here. But then swamps already looked like the end of the world anyway. Maximum entropy, land and water commingled chaotically. There wasn’t much further downhill they could go."

"“How’s it going?” “Pretty well,” Quentin said. “I’m not dead.”"

"But of course You can get so much done when everyone thinks You’re dead. No interruptions. No one prays to a dead God, why would they?"

"“And I think I’ve figured out how. I think I finally know how to fix everything.” “Historically speaking,” Alice said, “when people have said that they’ve almost always been wrong.”"

"Quentin thought about how wrong things had gone. Things so often went wrong. Was it him? Was he making the same mistake over and over again? Or different mistakes? He like to think he was at least making different mistakes."

"Now all I can see is how simple he made everything sound. Reading the Fillory books you would think that all one has to do is behave honorably and bravely and all will be well. What a lesson to teach young children. What a way to prepare them for the rest of their lives."

"“What do you think magic is for?” “I dunno. Don’t answer a question with a question.” “I used to think about this a lot,” Quentin said. “I mean, it’s not obvious like it is in books. It’s trickier. In books there’s always somebody standing by ready to say hey, the world’s in danger, evil’s on the rise, but if you’re really quick and take this ring and put it in that volcano over there everything will be fine. “But in real life that guy never turns up. He’s never there. He’s busy handing out advice in the next universe over. In our world no one ever knows what to do, and everyone’s just as clueless and full of crap as everyone else, and you have to figure it all out by yourself. And even after you’ve figured it out and done it, you’ll never know whether you were right or wrong. You’ll never know if you put the ring in the right volcano, or if things might have gone better if you hadn’t. There’s no answers in the back of the book."

"She wondered if later on she would wish she hadn’t looked. That was one thing about books: once you read them they couldn’t be unread."

"Even on the first day we invaded Plover’s house we sensed the conundrum that Americans are faced with in England: they’re too frightened of English people to behave rudely to them, and too ignorant to know how to behave politely."

"Heads turned. This was gossip of the very first water—pure pharmaceutical-grade gossip."

"This was a double game: he was trying to save his childhood, to preserve it and trap it in amber, but to do that he was calling on things that partook of the world beyond childhood, whose touch would leave him even less innocent than he already was. What would that make him? Neither a child nor an adult, neither innocent nor wise. Perhaps that is what a monster is."

"“Maybe Fillory doesn’t need a god right now. I think this age might just be a godless one.” A Fillory without a god. It was a radical notion. But he thought about it, and it didn’t seem like a terrible one. They would be on their own this time—the kings, the queens, the people, the animals, the spirits, the monsters. They’d have to decide what was right and just and fair for themselves. There would still be magic and wonders and all the rest of it, but they would figure out what to do with them with nobody looking over their shoulders, no divine parent-figure meddling with them and helping or not according to his or her divine mood."

"I admit that you might possibly not be deluding yourself about that."

"He’d always half expected that the watch would turn out to have some sort of amazing magical power—turning back time, maybe, or slowing it, or freezing it, or something. It certainly looked magical enough. But if it had any powers at all he’d never found them. Funny how some things you’re sure will pay off never do."

"New York’s magical underground may have been limited, but the number and variety of its drinking establishments was prodigious."

"“Sure, but real life’s not actually like that,” Quentin went on, fumbling after what he was sure was an important insight. “You don’t just go on fun adventures for good causes and have happy endings. You’re not going to be a character in a story, there’s nobody arranging everything for you. The real world just doesn’t work like that.”"

"The war we are losing is with time."

"Everybody has their own idiopathic reaction to their childhood home."

"“Sometimes I wonder if man was really meant to discover magic,” Fogg said expansively. “It doesn’t really make sense. It’s a little too perfect, don’t you think? If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn’t make it so. Words and thoughts don’t change anything. Language and reality are kept strictly apart—reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn’t care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn’t. You deal with it, and you get on with your life. “Little children don’t know that. Magical thinking: that’s what Freud called it. Once we learn otherwise we cease to be children. The separation of word and thing is the essential fact on which our adult lives are founded.”"

"He had reached the outer limits of what Fun, capital F, could do for him. The cost was way too high, the returns pitifully inadequate. His mind was dimly awakening, too late, to other things that were as important, or even more so."

"When he graduated he’d thought life was going to be like a novel, starring him on his own personal hero’s journey, and that the world would provide him with an endless series of evils to triumph over and life lessons to learn. It took him a while to figure out that wasn’t how it worked."

"Most people are blind to magic. They move through a blank and empty world. They’re bored with their lives, and there’s nothing they can do about it. They’re eaten alive by longing, and they’re dead before they die."

"“You’re an interesting case,” she said. There is really no end to life’s little humiliations, Quentin reflected."

"“He’s so happy,” Eliot said dryly. “It’s like he cooked something and it came out looking like the picture in the cookbook.”"

"His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling."

"Just then, for an instant, the film of reality slipped off the spokes of its projector. Everything went completely askew and then righted itself again as if nothing had happened."

"“The problem with growing up,” Quentin said, “is that once you’re grown up, people who aren’t grown up aren’t fun anymore.”"

"They were crossing so many lines it was hard to figure out where they were anymore."

"It was always easier to screw up somebody else’s spell than it was to cast one yourself. That was one of the many small unfairnesses of magic."

"He had no interest in TV anymore—it looked like an electronic puppet show to him, an artificial version of an imitation world that meant nothing to him anyway."