Jews From The United States

"There is going to be an inescapable tension between – and I’m going to call them the oligarchy; the establishment, the monied classes, the one percent – and the rest of us and the rest of humanity. And without some strong institution like the medieval church, to intervene, people are just going to go out for themselves. And there were some economic theorists who believe that’s the best thing for society, and they cling to that."

"I feel like all directing, writing, acting… all things feed into one another in a cool way. It’s just one of those jobs where it’s not too difficult to jump around because they’re all interconnected so to speak."

"I think I always try to go in with a very objective perspective at first. Inevitably, when playing someone like her, after a while you tend to really sympathize with her. It was very hard for me to divorce myself from that opinion."

"The drama of human rights, then, is that they emerged in the 1970s seemingly from nowhere. If the Soviet Union had generally lost credibility (and America’s Vietnamese adventure invited so much international outrage), human rights were not the immediate beneficiaries."

"Human rights are only a particular modern version of the ancient commitment by Plato and Deuteronomy—and Cyrus—to the cause of justice. Even among modern schemes of freedom and equality, they are only one among others; they were far from the first to make humanity’s global aspirations the central focus. Nor are human rights the only imaginable rallying cry around which to build a grassroots popular movement."

"The true history of human rights matters most of all, then, in order to confront their prospects today and in the future. If they do capture many longstanding values, it is equally critical to understand more honestly how and when human rights took shape as a widespread and powerful set of aspirations for a better and more humane world. After all, they have done far more to transform the terrain of idealism than they have the world itself."

"I bent over backwards to structure it and find ways to speak about it that avoided as much as possible the risk of its being seen as Buddhist, New Age, Eastern mysticism or just plain flaky."

"A good place to start is with yourself. See if you can give yourself gifts that may be true blessings, such as self-acceptance, or some time each day with no purpose. Practice feeling deserving enough to accept these gifts without obligation—to simply receive from yourself, and from the universe."

"If you know anything about Buddhism, you will know that the most important point is to be yourself and not try to become anything that you are not already. Buddhism is fundamentally about being in touch with your own deepest nature and letting it flow out of you unimpeded."

"Such is the power of mindful, selfless generosity. At the deepest level, there is no giver, no gift, and no recipient…only the universe rearranging itself."

"Jon Kabat-Zinn describes overwhelm as the all-too-common feeling “that our lives are somehow unfolding faster than the human nervous system and psyche are able to manage well.”"

"He has made millions by commercially franchising the ancient Vipassana system that Buddha himself taught. However, Kabat-Zinn markets the technique as his recent discovery. He learned to distance his work from Hindu and Buddhist traditions, and position it entirely as secular science with himself as the discoverer. When discussing with other scholars in the field, he admits to what he calls the ‘Asian’ origins of his methods, which he describes as a combination of three components: (1) Vipassana, a Theravada form of Buddhism; (2) Zen practices; and (3) Hatha Yoga, a kind of yoga that is more physical. Though these are clearly Indian systems with spiritual origins, those terms would undermine the clinical nature of his claims."

"To let go means to give up coercing, resisting, or struggling, in exchange for something more powerful and wholesome which comes out of allowing things to be as they are without getting caught up in your attraction to or rejection of them, in the intrinsic stickiness of wanting, of liking and disliking."

"It helps to have a focus for your attention, an anchor line to tether you to the present moment and to guide you back when the mind wanders. The breath serves this purpose exceedingly well. It can be a true ally. Bringing awareness to our breathing, we remind ourselves that we are here now, so we might as well be fully awake for whatever is already happening."

"Be a light unto yourself."

"The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing."

"Mindfulness practice means that we commit fully in each moment to be present; inviting ourselves to interface with this moment in full awareness, with the intention to embody as best we can an orientation of calmness, mindfulness, and equanimity right here and right now."

"Breathe and let be... Give yourself permission to allow this moment to be exactly as it is, and allow yourself to be exactly as you are."

"People made fun of me, the little kid who was making rock'n'roll records. But I knew. I would try to tell all the groups, we're doing something very important. Trust me. And it was very hard because these people didn't have that sense of destiny. They didn't know they were producing art that would change the world. I knew."

"I have devils inside that fight me."

"Here, I'm going to make you a big star … and you don't have to pay any dues. … For that, you're going to get no respect from your contemporaries. … To me, that was the cruelest thing."

"I enjoyed all the records very much. I made them all from the heart. I made them all with art in mind, and all to reveal a picture of where I was when I made them."

"We were writing little symphonies for the kids."

"I think there's something unspoken that whenever something emanates from you, you're going to get it back. And the fact is that it's emanated from a real place of friendship. I think that's translated. You can be down with a solo artist. You can be like, "I'm Ice Cube" — but you see two dudes on stage and you don't know why the fuck they're friends, you don't know how it happened and it doesn't require explanation. It allows people to feel a part of it, and they can be. At shows we see little five foot versions of us, fucking chubby white and black kids showing up with RTJ banners that they had made at their fucking house."

"Stick with it, be who you are. It’s going to be tough…But it’s also going to be beautiful."

"I had to find out the psychology [of the Emcee] and who he was off stage so that hopefully I could bring that biography into those numbers.."

"He sat in the window thinking. Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in another. Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against Nature . . . the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth while."

"I called this doctor who was taking care of Rock Hudson. He said: ‘Do you have to kiss the actor?’ I said: ‘Yeah, it’s important in the script.’ He said: ‘Then I wouldn’t do the play.’ [Grey wrestled with it and chose the play and the kiss] I said: ‘I need to tell this story. As an actor it’s my job.’"

"The energy of American Jewish writers was so charged, so buoyant, that for a time they appeared to dominate American fiction. But there was so little Jewish energy in this art that one could invent parlor games over the ethnic or religious identity of its authors: Edna Ferber? Waldo Frank? Lillian Hellman? Nathanael West? Norman Mailer? E. L. Doctorow?"

"The exiles, living in mud and fear of death, had, in one way at least, found a better home than those from which they had been driven, a blood-spattered Utopia, now on the fringe of German soil, where no man was rich and none poor, a shell-burst democracy where all living was a community enterprise, where all food was distributed according to need and not according to pocket, where light, heat, lodging, transportation, medical attention, and funeral benefits were at the cost of the government and available with absolute impartiality to white and black, Jew and Gentile, worker and owner, where the means of production, in this case M1s, 30 caliber machine guns, 90s, 105s, 204s, mortars, bazookas, were in the hands of the masses; that ultimate Christian socialism in which all worked for the common good and the only leisure class were the dead."

"We see our cities crumble under the enemy’s bombs, and we mourn for our children struck at their early tasks by the enemy’s bullets, and we strike back, cruelly and wildly, from the seabed of our hatred, at his cities and his children. The enemy is more savage than the tiger, hungrier than the shark, crueler than the wolf; in honor and in defense of our moderate way of life, we stand up to him and combat him, but in doing so we out-tiger him, out-shark the shark, over-wolf the wolf. Will we at the end of all this then pretend to ourselves that the victory is ours? The thing we defend perishes from our victory as it would never perish from our defeat."

"Do not boast to me in your newspapers of the thousands of tons of bombs you have let loose at random on the unhappy land of Germany, because I will tell you that you have let loose those bombs on me, on your church, on yourselves and on your God. Tell me, rather, how you have wept for the single German soldier you have been forced to kill as he stood before you armed and dangerous, and I will say, you are my defender and the defender of my church and my England."

"Kill, if you must, because in our weakness and in our error, we have found no other road to peace, but kill remorsefully, kill with a sense of sorrow, kill with economy for the immortal souls who leave this life in battle, carry mercy in your cartridge cases, forgiveness in your knapsacks, kill without revenge, because vengeance is not yours but the Lord’s, kill, knowing that each life you spend makes your life that much the poorer."

"To the Generals eighty miles away, the reports on casualties are encouraging. To the man on the scene the casualties are never encouraging. When he is hit or when the man next to him is hit, when the ship fifty feet away explodes, when the Naval Ensign on the bridge is screaming in a high, girlish voice for his mother because he has nothing left below his belt, it can only appear to him that he has been involved in a terrible accident, and it is inconceivable at that moment to believe that there is a man eighty miles away who has foreseen that accident, encouraged it, made arrangements for it to happen, and who can report, after it has happened (although he must know about the shell, about the listing Landing Craft Infantry, about the wet decks and the screaming Ensign) that everything is going according to plan."

". A lot of people aren’t really liberals, they’re conservatives. They’ve just never heard what a conservative believes from a conservative. All I ever knew was what liberals said conservatives believed. I knew that Democrats like peace and Republicans like war. Well, I like peace. I must be a Democrat. Democrats like air and water. I like air and water. I must be a Democrat."

"Donald Trump is America’s first wartime president in the Culture War. During wartime, things like “dignity” and “collegiality” simply aren’t the most essential qualities one looks for in their warriors."

"Succeeding in business is not just about making money. Money is important, but it’s not the real driver — certainly not for me. I have found that what drives me is the desire to prove, to myself and to my peers, that I can do what I set out to do and build something that matters. I’ve done that by recruiting smart people — many from traditional corporate environments –and giving them a dose of entrepreneurial spirit. You achieve long-term success step by step. Try to achieve your goals one at a time, like you do target practice. I look at each day as a chance to move one notch above yesterday — whether it’s in service quality, delivery, speed, or any other aspect of the business. I don’t measure my “success” every day. I measure how much we have left to do. In that sense, business success is just a form of persistence.""

"[listening and learning] first-hand about the views attitudes and experiences of the Tribes ... the more I heard, the more I’ve learned, and the more I saw, the more resolved I became about helping to address the challenges that plague the Native American community.""

"Market optimism that this time is different is misguided and dangerous."

"Investment success doesn’t come from "buying good things", but rather from "buying things well"."

"Such "self-evident" one-sidedness—the affirmation of a value so unquestioned, because so obviously unquestionable, as that of the Child whose innocence solicits our defense—is precisely, of course, what distinguishes public service announcements from the partisan discourse of political argumentation. But it is also, I suggest, what makes such announcements so oppressively political—political not in the partisan terms implied by the media consultant, but political in a far more insidious way: political insofar as the fantasy subtending the image of the Child invariably shapes the logic within which the political itself must be thought. That logic compels us, to the extent that we would register as politically responsible, to submit to the framing of political debate—and, indeed, of the political field—as defined by the terms of what this book describes as reproductive futurism: terms that impose an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations."

"This project stakes its claim to the very space that "politics" makes unthinkable: the space outside the framework within which politics as we know it appears and so outside the conflict of visions that share as their presupposition that the body politic must survive. Indeed, at the heart of my polemical engagement with the cultural text of politics and the politics of cultural texts lies a simple provocation: that queerness names the side of those not "fighting for the children," the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism."

"Far from partaking of this narrative movement toward a viable political future, far from perpetuating the fantasy of meaning's eventual realization, the queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or form."

"I argue, then, that we might do well to attempt what is surely impossible—to withdraw our allegiance, however compulsory, from a reality based on the Ponzi scheme of reproductive futurism."

"The various positivities produced ... by the logic of political hope depend on the mathematical illusion that negated negations might somehow escape, and not redouble, such negativity."

"To attempt to occupy a place as speaking subject within the traditional gender frame is to become complicit in the discourse which one wishes to deconstruct."

"Transsexuals for whom gender identity is something different from and perhaps irrelevant to physical genitalia are occulted by those for whom the power of the medical/psychological establishments, and their ability to act as gatekeepers for cultural norms, is the final authority for what counts as a culturally intelligible body."

"It is difficult to generate a counterdiscourse if one is programmed to disappear. The highest purpose of the [medically defined] transsexual is to erase h/erself, to fade into the "normal" population as soon as possible. Part of this process is known as constructing a plausible history--learning to lie effectively about one's past. What is gained is acceptability in society. ... In the transsexual's erased history we can find a story disruptive to the accepted discourses of gender."

"We probably had a one percent chance at succeeding because most people who attempt to do this fail, but if you’re not afraid to fail let’s go for it."

"It's a test mentally, physically and spiritually at times. You must try to stay in the process of creating, which will always have obstacles."