Jews From The United States

"Those who write about life, reflect about life…. you see in others who you are."

"If your train's on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station."

"One can't make pure clay of time's mud. There is no life that can be recaptured wholly; as it was. Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction."

"I think I said "All men are Jews except they don't know it." I doubt I expected anyone to take the statement literally. But I think it's an understandable statement and a metaphoric way of indicating how history, sooner or later, treats all men."

"There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to – if there are no doors or windows – he walks through a wall."

"… keep in mind that the purpose of freedom is to create it for others."

"Mourning is a hard business," Cesare said. "If people knew there'd be less death."

"If you ever forget you are a Jew a goy will remind you."

"Levin wanted friendship and got friendliness; he wanted steak and they offered spam."

"I don't think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own."

"Without heroes, we're all plain people, and don't know how far we can go."

"You believe in freedom of speech for communists because what they say is true. You do not believe in freedom of speech for fascists because what they say is a lie."

"I am not on trial here, Mr. Chairman. This committee is on trial here before the American people. Let us get that straight."

"just as a racist remark by Jackie Mason does not reveal the inherent racism of all Jews, let us not assume that an anti-Semitic remark by Leonard Jeffries, or by ten Leonard Jeffries, reveals the heart of the African American community. We need to recognize the destructive role played by the media in fanning the flames of the "Black-Jewish Conflict.""

"Eighty percent of married men cheat in America. The rest cheat in Europe."

"If we live a life full of regret, full of things we haven't done, if we've lived an unfulfilled life, when death comes along, it's a lot worse. I think it's true for all of us."

"I think living well is the key: trying not to build up regrets for the things we didn't do in our lives; to try to live a regret-free life in which we feel satisfied in what we're doing; and to try to be kind to ourselves and not disappointed in ourselves."

"One of the most important things was from a patient who said to me what a pity it was that he had to wait until now, when he was riddled with death, to learn how to live. And I have used that phrase many times: hoping that if you introduce people, in an appropriate way, to their mortality that might change the way they live and allow them to trivialise the trivia in their life."

"What an existential approach is about is positing that our bad feelings, our dysphoria, our despair, our anxiety emanates not only from our own life history and all the traumas we may have had in the past, and not only from the figures that we have introjected — many of these figures being unloving, or uncaring, or neurotic on their own parts — and emanates not only from our current life crises, but it emanates also, also, from our confrontation with the existential facts of life, with our confrontation with the human condition."

"It has become an axiom that, to accomplish results organization is requisite. Nevertheless, there is "organization" and "organization."That this is so appears clearly from the fact that the pure and simmplers have been going about saying to the workers: "Organize! Organize!"and after they have been saying that, and have been organizing"and "organizing" for the past thirty or forty years, we find that they are virtually where they started, if not worse off; that their "organization" parttakes of the nature of the lizard, whose tail destroys what his foreparts build up."

"Capitalism attacks and destroys all the finer sentiments of the human heart; it ruthlessly sweeps away old traditions and ideas opposed to its progress, and it exploits and corrupts those things once held sacred."

"I felt DeLeon understood Marx very well abstractly but knew little about the practical needs of the labor movement. The last time I talked with DeLeon I told him I was moving to Philadelphia and was willing to accept the secretaryship of the S.L.P. local there, which had been offered me, but that I could not go along with their principles wholeheartedly. As a good friend of mine, DeLeon accepted what I said without anger, but would not change his methods."

"Daniel De Leon, the head of the Socialist Labor Party in the United States, translated Woman Under Socialism into English, and felt compelled in his introduction to disassociate himself from Bebel's more unconventional views of women. In a statement that echoed Engels in its sentiments (but was far more rigid), De Leon argued: “For one, I hold there is as little ground for rejecting monogamy, by reason of the taint that clings to its inception, as there would be ground for rejecting co-operation, by reason of the like taint that accompanied its rise, and also clings to its development. For one, I hold that the monogamous family-bruised and wounded in the cruels rough-and-will have its wounds staunched, its bruises tumble of modern society healed, and, enabled by the slowly acquired moral forces of conjugal paternal, and filial affection, bloom under socialism into a lever of mighty power for the moral and physical elevation of the races." When De Leon repeatedly admonished women that feminism must be subordinated to the (masculine) needs of the working-class revolution, he spoke for the typical American male socialist. He informed women that "the history of Class Rule throws its light before the feet of the Woman's movement; it explains the errors, accounts for them, that the movement slips into; the emotional vagaries with which the movement is often marred; its futile tears; its frequently barren efforts"; and he ridiculed the assumption of feminists "that woman was smitten down because of her sex. She was not." At great pains to point out that women had no special problem related to their femaleness, he constantly reminded them that their true mission lay in assisting working-class men to create the socialist revolution."

"The Socialist Labor Party (SLP), formed after the collapse of the First International in 1872, decided to organize black workers in order to solve the problem of competition. But SLP leaders believed, as did their predecessors in the First International, that once the socialist revolution came, all race problems would disappear. SLP leader Daniel DeLeon put it succinctly: "There was no such thing as a race or Negro question'... there was only a social, a labor question...so far as the Socialist and labor movements were concerned." It was an odd position to take, especially by the 1890s when lynching increased, racial segregation became law, and African-American citizens who worked so hard for the Republican Party in the days of Reconstruction were suddenly disfranchised. Of course, black people fought back, joining unions of farmers and workers, forming armed self-defense organizations, and building religious, fraternal, educational, and political institutions that ultimately became sources of power and inspiration for the stony road ahead."

"(The IWW} was not only the inheritor of many of the traditions of the 1880's but personalities who were identified with the 1880's were present at the early conventions of the IWW. The names may not be known to you unless you are students of labor history but included were such figures as Eugene Debs, Daniel DeLeon and Mrs. Lucy Parsons"

"Go out into the field and bring in the rest of the workers, that they may be fully equipped for their great mission. We will wrest what we can, step by step, from the capitalists, but with out eye fixed upon the goal; we will press forward, keeping step together with the inspiring music of the new emancipation; and when we have enough of this kind of organization, as Brother DeLeon said so happily the other day, when we are lined up in battle array and the capitalists try to lock us out, we will turn the tables on the gentlemen and lock them out. We can run the mills without them but they cannot run them without us."

"If a law or an election, distasteful to the ruling class, was forced through; if, for any one of the thousand and one causes, apt to arise whenever actual oligarchic power is draped in the drapery of democratic forms, the Ruling Class of Rome found it prudent to yield in Forum and Senate Hall;-- in such cases the Colleges of Priests would conveniently discover some flaw in the auspices, some defect in the sacrifices. That annulled the election or the law, as "condemned by the gods.""

"These “directors,” and the capitalist class in general, may perform some “work,” they do perform some “work,” but that “work” is not of a sort that directly or indirectly aids production, any more than the intense mental strain and activity of the “work” done by the pickpocket is directly or indirectly productive."

"Socialism knows that revolutionary upheavals and transformations proceed from the rock bed of material needs. With a full appreciation of and veneration for moral impulses that are balanced with scientific knowledge, it eschews, looks with just suspicion upon and gives a wide berth to balloon morality, or be it those malarial fevers that reformers love to dignify with the name of "moral feelings""

"Our system of production is in the nature of an orchestra. No one man, no one town, no one state, can be said any longer to be independent of the other; the whole people of the United States, every individual therein, is dependent and interdependent upon all the others. The nature of the machinery of production; the subdivision of labor, which aids cooperation and which cooperation fosters, and which is necessary to the plentifulnesss of production that civilization requires, compel a harmonious working together of all departments of labor, and thence complete the establishment of a central directing authority, of an orchestral director, so to speak, of the orchestra of the cooperative commonwealth."

"Socialism rejects the premises and the conclusions of anarchy upon the State and upon government. What socialism says is "Away with the economic system that alters the beneficent functions of the central direction authority from an aid to production into a means of oppression." And it proceeds to show that, when the instruments of production shall be owned no longer by the minority, but shall be restored to the Commonwealth; that when, as a results of this, no longer the minority or any portion of the people shall be in poverty and classes, class distinctions and class rule shall, as they necessarily must, have vanished, that then the central directing authority will lose all its repressive functions and is bound to reassume the functions it had in the old communities of our ancestors, become against a necessary aid, and assist in production."

"We Socialists are not reformers; we are revolutionaries. We Socialists do not propose change forms. We care nothing for forms. We want a change of the inside of the mechanism of society, let the form take care of itself."

"As a poodle may have his hair cut long or his hair cut short, as he may be trimmed with pink ribbons or with blue ribbons, yet he remains the same old poodle, so capitalism may be trimmed with factory laws, tenement laws, divorce laws and gambling laws, but it remains the same old capitalism. These “humanitarian parts” are only trimming the poodle. Socialism, one and inseparable with its “antirent and anticapital parts,” means to get rid of the poodle."

"Bob and I got on very well during the years I worked on Batman. He was a mild-mannered individual who made no demands on Jerry [Robinson] and me, and in general, he was terrific to work for."

"A lot of people don't give him [Kane] as much credit for his art, but I thought he had a flair. It was rudimentary, but in a way that worked to his benefit in the strip. He didn't know much about perspective and anatomy, so he had to improvise."

"Robin was an outgrowth of a conversation I had with Bob. As I said, Batman was a combination of Fairbanks and Sherlock Holmes. Holmes had his Watson. The thing that bothered me was that Batman didn't have anyone to talk to, and it got a little tiresome always having him thinking. I found that as I went along Batman needed a Watson to talk to. That's how Robin came to be. Bob called me over and said he was going to put a boy in the strip to identify with Batman. I thought it was a great idea."

"There were other Batman writers throughout the years but they could never capture the style and flavor of Bill's scripts. Bill was the best writer in the business and it seemed that he was destined to write Batman."

"Bill Finger and I created the Joker. Bill was the writer. Jerry Robinson came to me with a playing card of the Joker. That's the way I sum it up. [The Joker] looks like Conrad Veidt — you know, the actor in The Man Who Laughs, [the 1928 movie based on the novel] by Victor Hugo. … Bill Finger had a book with a photograph of Conrad Veidt and showed it to me and said, 'Here's the Joker'. Jerry Robinson had absolutely nothing to do with it. But he'll always say he created it till he dies. He brought in a playing card, which we used for a couple of issues for him [the Joker] to use as his playing card"."

"Bill Finger was a contributing force on Batman right from the beginning. He wrote most of the great stories and was influential in setting the style and genre other writers would emulate … I made Batman a superhero-vigilante when I first created him. Bill turned him into a scientific detective."

"Children know precious little, but that profound ignorance comes from profound innocence. People really mean to say that innocence is bliss. And bliss is short-lived."

"Why did it have to be ? Why couldn't it have been hypermnesia? Or ? Or hypochondria?"

"'Tell me who I am.' 'Halloween,' she said. I'd been rooting against it, but when the word came, it was almost a relief...Hell, I thought. A rose by any other name. 'And who is that?' 'You are my Lord Halloween, Prince of the Marshes, King of Kadath, High Sovereign of the Orange and Black.'"

"...bright like a fantastically annoying firefly. Was it a firefly? I couldn't see any wings. I took a step back. It floated forward. I thought: I am on some terrible drug."

"I remember the shock and... ...and nothing. Just the shock."

"All hail the conquering hero. My best friend betrayed me, so I shot him. Distracted by a kiss, I let the love of my life die."

"I stood in the greeting-card aisle, looking for an appropriate sentiment. Though I searched high and low, there was no "so you're not even human" sympathy card."

"I felt like taking on the world. I felt more in control than I'd ever been. My partner in this endeavor: the psychotic who just broke my nose."

"...and he died for what?--what thrill?--what cause?--tell me what treasure is worth the oxygen in a good man's brain?"

"Of course you think someone's trying to kill you, Hal--death is your favorite subject. Why shouldn't someone be trying to kill you?"

"'I thought I put a stake through your heart,' he said. 'I don't hold a grudge,' shrugged Doom."