Jews From The United States

"Women have been allowed to achieve individuality only though their appearance."

"Constant erotic stimulation of male sexuality coupled with its forbidden release through most normal channels are designed to encourage men to look at women as only things whose resistance to entrance must be overcome."

"I submit that love is essentially a much simpler phenomenon – it becomes complicated, corrupted, or obstructed by an unequal balance of power. We have seen that love demands a mutual vulnerability or it turns destructive: the destructive effects of love occur only in a context of inequality. But because sexual inequality has remained a constant – however its degree may have varied – the corruption 'romantic' love became characteristic of love between the sexes."

"Bliss in love is seldom the case: for every successful contemporary love experience, for every short period of enrichment, there are ten destructive love experiences, post-love ‘downs’ of much longer duration – often resulting in the destruction of the individual, or at least an emotional cynicism that makes it difficult or impossible ever to love again."

"Contrary to popular opinion, love is not altruistic. [...] Love is the height of selfishness: the self attempts to enrich itself through the absorption of another being. Love is being psychically wide-open to another. It is a situation of total emotional vulnerability. Therefore it must be not only the incorporation of the other, but an exchange of selves. Anything short of a mutual exchange will hurt one or the other party. There is nothing inherently destructive about this process. A little healthy selfishness would be a refreshing change. Love between two equals would be an enrichment, each enlarging himself through the other: instead of being one, locked in the cell of himself with only his own experience and view, he could participate in the existence of another – an extra window on the world. This accounts for the bliss that successful lovers experience: lovers are temporarily freed from the burden of isolation that every individual bears."

"Women and love are underpinnings. Examine them and you threaten the very structure of culture."

"Love has never been understood, though it may have been fully experienced, and that experience communicated."

"A book on radical feminism that did not deal with love would be a political failure. For love, perhaps even more than childbearing, is the pivot of women's oppression today."

"Children, then, are not freer than adults. They are burdened by a wish fantasy in direct proportion to the restraints of their narrow lives; with an unpleasant sense of their own physical inadequacy and ridiculousness; with constant shame about their dependence, economic and otherwise (‘Mother, may I?’); and humiliation concerning their natural ignorance of practical affairs. Children are repressed at every waking minute. Childhood is hell."

"Every person in his first trip to a foreign country, where he knows neither the people nor the language, experiences childhood."

"There is some irony in the fact that children imagine that parents can do what they want, and parents imagine that children do. "When I grow up..." parallels "Oh to be a child again...""

"Self-regulation is the basis of freedom, and dependence the origin of inequality."

"The myth of childhood has an even greater parallel in the myth of Femininity. Both women and children were considered asexual and thus"purer" than man. Their inferior status was ill-concealed under an elaborate "respect." One didn't discuss serious matters nor did one curse in from of women and children; one didn't openly degrade them, one did it behind their backs."

"The ideology of school was the ideology of childhood. It operated on the assumption that children needed"discipline," that they were special creatures who had to be handled in a special way (child psych., child ed., etc.) and that to facilitate this they should be corralled in a special place with tie own kind, and with an age group as restricted to their own as possible."

"We can also see the class basis of the emerging concept of child hood in the system of child education that came in along with it. If childhood was only an abstract concept, then the modern school was the institution that built it into reality."

"In the Middle Ages there was no such thing as childhood. The medieval view of children was profoundly different from ours."

"Matriarchy is a stage on the way to patriarchy, to man’s fullest realization of himself; he goes from worshipping Nature through women to conquering it. Though it’s true that woman’s lot worsened considerably under patriarchy, she never had it good; for despite all the nostalgia it is not hard to prove that matriarchy was never an answer to women’s fundamental oppression. Basically it was no more than a different means of counting lineage and inheritance, one which, though it might have held more advantages for women than the later patriarchy, did not allow women into the society as equals. To be worshipped is not freedom. For worship still takes place in someone else’s head, and that head belongs to Man. Thus throughout history, in all stages and types of culture, women have been oppressed due to their biological functions."

"Women and children are always mentioned in the same breath ("Women and children to the forts!"). The special tie women have with children is recognized by everyone. I submit, however, that the nature of this bond is no more than shared oppression. And that moreover this oppression i intertwined and mutually reinforcing in such complex ways that we will be an able to speak of the liberation of women without also discussing the liberation of children, and since versa. The heart of woman's oppressing is her childbearing and childrearing roles. And in turn children are defined in relation to this role and are psychologically formed by it; what they become as adults and the sorts of relationships they are able to form determine the society they will ultimately built."

"Because class oppression of women and children couched in the phraseology of "cute" it is much harder to fight than open oppression"

"Contemporary slang reflects this animal state: children are "mice," "rabbits," "kittens," women are called "chicks," (in England( "birds," "hens," "dumb clucks," "silly geese," "old mares," "bitches." Similar terminology is used about males as a defamation of character, or more broadly only about pressed males males: stud, wold, cat, stag, jack - and then it is used much more rarely, and often with a specifically sexual connotation."

"I submit that the only way that the can make full sense is in terms of power. We must keep in mind that Freud observed this complex as common to every normal individual who grows up in the of a patriarchal society, a form of social organization that intensifies the worst effects of the inequalities inherent in the biological family itself. There is some evidence to prove that the effects of the Oedipus Complex decrease in societies where males hold less power, and that the weakening of patriarchalism produces many cultural changes that perhaps can be traced to this relaxation."

"I'm dreaming of a white Christmas, Just like the ones I used to know."

"It's February the 22nd And I can't tell a lie."

"Irving Berlin has no place in American music. He is American music."

"The bad boy tweaking the nose of the Establishment [with] the countenance of a Jewish leprechaun."

"The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret."

"I just don't want to die the same day Castro dies."

"Whether it's the best of times or the worst of times, it's the only time we've got."

"Don't commit suicide, because you might change your mind two weeks later."

"People ask what I am really trying to do with humor. The answer is, "I'm getting even." … For me, being funny is the best revenge."

"If you attack the establishment long enough and hard enough, they will make you a member of it."

"Just when you think there's nothing to write about, Nixon says, "I am not a crook." Jimmy Carter says, "I have lusted after women in my heart." President Reagan says, "I have just taken a urinalysis test, and I am not on dope.""

"You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it."

"People are broad-minded. They'll accept the fact that a person can be an alcoholic, a dope fiend, a wife beater and even a newspaperman, but if a man doesn't drive, there's something wrong with him."

"Every time you think television has hit its lowest ebb, a new...program comes along to make you wonder where you thought the ebb was."

"The powder is mixed with water and tastes exactly like powder mixed with water."

"A bad liver is to a Frenchman what a nervous breakdown is to an American. Everyone has had one and everyone wants to talk about it."

"I like champagne—because it always tastes like my foot's asleep."

"I always wanted to get into politics, but I was never light enough to make the team."

"The joy of his column was not that it was side-splitting humor, but that he made you smile."

"Art was the Mark Twain of our time. For decades there was no better way to start the day than to open the morning paper to Art's column, laugh out loud and learn all over again to take the issues seriously in the world of politics, but not take yourself too seriously. The special art of Art Buchwald was to make even the worst of times better."

"What Art had was the gift of laughter — that's a rarity today. He could take simple ordinary things and make you laugh. God knows all of us need that. I've been with him in all kinds of situations, good and bad, triumph and tragedy but Art always was able to see a little wisp of humor in everything."

"Three of us — Bill Styron, he and I — suffered depression simultaneously, so we walked around in the rain together on Martha's Vineyard and consoled each other... He did the best to make life palatable, to help you be optimistic, to let you know he believed you would beat it. We both did, and so did Bill. We named ourselves the 'Blues Brothers.'"

"Seemingly, this society wants its children to know nothing; wants its queer children to conform or (and this is not a figure of speech) die; and wants not to know that it is getting what it wants."

"One of the things that 'queer' can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically."

"With respect to the homosocial/homosexual style, it seems to be possible to divide Victorian men among three rough categories according to class. The first includes aristocratic men and small groups of their friends and dependents, including bohemians and prostitutes; for these people, by 1865, a distinct homosexual role and culture seem already to have been in existence in England... It seems to have constituted a genuine subculture, facilitated in the face of an ideologically hostile dominant culture by money, privilege, internationalism, and for the most part, the ability to command secrecy... This role is closely related to — is in fact, through Oscar Wilde, the antecedent of — the particular stereotype that at least until recently has characterized American middle-class gay homosexuality; its strongest associations, as we have noted, are with effeminacy, transvestism, promiscuity, prostitution, continental European culture, and the arts."

"I've heard of many people who claim they'd as soon their children were dead as gay. What it took me a long time to believe is that these people are saying no more than the truth. They even speak for others too delicate to use the cruel words."

"Close your eyes and listen. Listen to the silent screams of terrified mothers, the prayers of anguished old men and women. Listen to the tears of children. Jewish children, a beautiful little girl among them, with golden hair, whose vulnerable tenderness has never left me. Look and listen as they walk towards dark flames so gigantic that the planet itself seemed in danger."

"Elie Wiesel, a pious Hungarian boy whose life had been circumscribed by Jewish faith until his arrest, discovered Western literature in Paris after the war and wrote his memoir under its formative influence ten years later, he began his literary odyssey as a Yiddish and Hebrew writer but then turned his first book into French and wrote thereafter in his adopted language, largely about his native Yiddish and Hebrew culture."

"Elie Wiesel warned us that there may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest."