Jews From The United States

"Perhaps these experiences of cognitive man are lacking in the emotional dynamic and turbulent passion of aesthetic man; perhaps these experiences are devoid of flashy and externally impressive bursts of ecstasy or stychic enthusiasm. However, they are possessed of a profound depth and a clear penetrating vision. They do not flourish and then wither away like experiences that are only based on a vague, obscure moment of psychic upheaval."

"Not only the qualitative world bursts forth in song, but so does the quantitative."

"As a result of scientific man's creativity there arises an ordered, illumined, determined world, imprinted with the stamp of creative intellect, of pure reason and clear cognition. From the midst of the order and lawfulness we hear a new song, the song of the creature to the Creator, the song of the cosmos to its Maker."

"The physicist ... engages in complex and difficult calculations, involving the manipulating of ideal, mathematical quantities that, at first glance, are wholly lacking in the music of the living world and the beauty of the resplendent cosmos. It would seem as if there exists no relationship between these quantities and reality. Yet these ideal numbers that cannot be grasped by one's senses, these numbers that only are meaningful from within the system itself, only meaningful as part of abstract mathematical functions, symbolize the image of existence."

"Halakhic man, well furnished with rules, judgments, and fundamental principles, draws near the world with an a priori relation. His approach begins with an ideal creation and concludes with a real one. To whom may he be compared? To a mathematician who fashions an ideal world and then uses it for the purpose of establishing a relationship between it and the real world. ... The essence of the Halakhah, which was received from God, consists in creating an ideal world and cognizing the relationship between that ideal world and our concrete environment."

"On the night of the exodus, the people met God, had a rendezvous with Him, and made His acquaintance for the first time. On Yom Kippur night, man gets very close to his Father in heaven, again meets Him, talks to Him, cries before and implores Him. The grandeur and singularity of these two nights lie in the God-man confrontation."

"There is a distinct reluctance, almost an unwillingness, on the part of Torah to grant man the privilege to consume meat. Man as an animal-eater is looked at askance by the Torah. There are definitive vegetarian tendencies in the Bible."

"Man of old who could not fight disease and succumbed in multitudes to yellow fever or any other plague could not lay claim to dignity. Only the man who builds hospitals, discovers therapeutic techniques, and saves lives is blessed with dignity."

"I am obsessed with architecture. It is true, I am restless, trying to find myself as an architect, and how best to contribute in this world filled with contradiction, disparity, and inequality, even passion and opportunity."

"I do think democracy has produced chaos, especially visual. A lot of people don't like it and yearn for nineteenth-century images, forgetting that the politics of those images were different than the democracy we love."

"I think my best skill as an architect is the achievement of hand-to-eye coordination. I am able to transfer a sketch into a model into the building."

"[ Brancusi ] has had more influence on my work than most architects."

"I get that a lot because I've hung around with a lot of artists and I'm very close to a lot of them. I'm very involved in their work; I think a lot of my ideas have grown out of it, and that there's been some give and take."

"Life is chaotic, dangerous, and surprising. Buildings should reflect that."

"Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness."

"I approach each building as a sculptural object, a spatial container, a space with light and air, a response to context and appropriateness of feeling and spirit. To this container, this sculpture, the user brings his baggage, his program, and interacts with it to accommodate his needs. If he can't do that, I've failed."

"A President is best judged by the enemies he makes when he has really hit his stride."

"With all the turmoil of the mid- and late 20th century, Mr. Lerner insisted that he preferred the present "awful but magnificent" era to any other in history. But in a book he wrote in 1957, America as a Civilization: Life and Thought in the United States Today, he talked of his age as a time in which there was a "fear of ideas and the tenacious cult of property." His espousal of ideas regarded as liberal in the 1950's did not sit well with everyone... Between 1932 and 1935, Mr. Lerner served on the faculty of both Sarah Lawrence College and the Wellesley Summer Institute. After a brief stint teaching at Harvard, he edited The Nation magazine for a time and then taught political science at Williams College from 1938 to 1943. Before joining The Post in 1949, he also wrote columns for The New York Star... He continued writing for The Post until two weeks ago."

"Max Lerner, an educator, journalist and student of American civilization who was for many years a syndicated columnist for The New York Post, died yesterday... He was 89 ... Mr. Lerner was one of the more conspicuous of the post-World War II nonfiction writers, a humanist whose unabashed liberal conscience led him to the political barricades for more than three decades. Many of his concerns now seem prescient. In 1959, for example, in a speech at Douglass College in New Brunswick, N.J., Mr. Lerner called for the formation of an antiwar elite, making it clear that he was worried about what he saw as growing mediocrity among American students."

"Brilliant as he is, Lerner suffers from anguish over the capitalists. He is not pro-Communist... The exigencies of writing each day for a daily might be the cause of his continual harping on the wrongs done minorities, which makes far more noise rather than a sound appeal for their rights. Another safe target are corporations and their selfish attacks on labor unions, and even government regulations against strikes.... His dispatches on the 1948 Philadelphia conventions, both Republican and Democratic, analyze well public sentiment over the two parties and their candidates, even if Lerner guessed wrong about the outcome. His appraisals of the personalities of Wallace, Truman, and others sound solid and reasonable, and much of his thinking on domestic political questions is keen and supportable. All in all, one can disagree with what Lerner writes but still admit that the way he writes is stimulating, pro and con."

"To see ourselves as we aren't, but as he would like us to be, read Actions and Passions, by Max Lerner (Simon & Schuster, $3.50). He calls these chapters "Notes on the Multiple Revolution of our Time," which of course they are, since they concern today's upside-down world."

"Nevertheless, as readers familiar with Mr. Lerner's previous works know, the range of his interests is amazing. In this book he comments on such diverse matters as President Truman's handling of the 1946 railroad strike..., Charlie Chaplin's superb ability as a mime, H. G. Wells's imaginative writing, Palestine, the cold war, Trotsky and Stalin, the evil of the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crowism, the 1948 political conventions, and the management of the Brooklyn Dodgers. In all of these and the many other pieces which make up the book the Enemy is always Status Quo."

"We should be less concerned about the missile gap than the intelligence gap... less worried about the missile race than the intelligence race."

"The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors."

"I have believed in love and work, and their linkage. I have believed that we are neither angels nor devils, but humans, with clusters of potentials in both directions. I am neither an optimist nor pessimist, but a possibilist."

"I have for some time been impatient with the prevailing sense of pessimism and despair, especially among the intellectual and professional groups of the "New Class." I am not blind to the tragic and absurd, which seem to have been built into our time and perhaps into the human constitution. But I also feel that the sense of hope and possibility is also built in over the millennia of human coping. It is no small part of the new transformative insights that they have released this sense of hope and possibility."

"Marilyn Ferguson is the best reporter today on the farther reaches of investigation into the life and human sciences. She represents a new kind of investigative journalist—not a sleuth after the corruptions of a politician but one tracking the spoor of a new research idea in all its windings; following it to its sources and its affinities in allied fields, its conclusions, its implications for the whole spectrum of human thought and consciousness... Nietzsche talked of philosophy as the gay science, the joyful science, and to Marilyn Ferguson the area of knowledge she has staked out for her reporting and synthesizing is a joyful science."

"Life is a protracted struggle against the Adversary, who is man himself."

"Years from now, when historians can look back and put our time into perspective, they will say that of its towering figures—more truly great than generals and diplomats, business grants and labor grants, bigger than most of our presidents—was a man called Brandeis."

"The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word... To reject the word is to reject the human search."

"The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little."

"There is one difference between a tax collector and a taxidermist—the taxidermist leaves the hide."

"Asch found that fewer than 25 per cent of participants resisted conforming their reported perception to those of the group on at least some of the trials. However, there were differences: some individuals always conform to the decisions of the group, whereas others would conform only some of the time. Asch's research on conformity to group pressure had a significant impact on the field of group dynamics and anticipated Milgram's and Zimbardo's research on obedience. In this respect Milgram's work was a conscious continuation of the study of conformity pioneered by Asch."

"A pioneering social psychologist who studied how peer pressure shapes human behavior but believed that most people act decently when they are not shackled by ignorance … Dr. Asch's early experiments on compliance — the effects of social pressure on one's perception and interpretation of the world, and on how one forms impressions of others — are widely recognized as among the century's seminal studies in social psychology. … Prof. Henry Gleitman of the University of Pennsylvania's psychology department said Dr. Asch was a man who understood better than most how individuals can do regrettable things in the desire to get along but who nonetheless thought that "people would behave humanely, morally, if appropriately informed.""

"It becomes clear that the Asch, Milgram and Zimbardo experiments replicated, in a compressed time, the dynamics of authority and groupthink that play a critical role in our socialization. Asch showed that once the standard is set, people will adopt it and go along with it, even if it is illogical. When the stakes are raised, as they were in Milgram's work, people may struggle with unethical commands, but the majority still obey. And when authorities set parameters but leave the decision-making to the rest of us, we still have a tendency to impose strict control on those we consider deviant. All of these findings affirm the power of culture, socialization, and our widespread fear that we will be judged and punished. Since human beings have a desperate need for safety, approval, and belonging (which yields access to group resources), the worst kind of punishment is ostracism. This shunning may be subtle or extreme."

"Solomon Asch's studies of independence and conformity are among the most significant in the history of psychology. They are models of rigorous analysis of a socially relevant question based on a well-controlled research design."

"I judge Asch to be an antifoundationalist. While the perceptions of the individual knower are to be respected, they are not infallible, but instead are context dependent, relative to a frame of reference. … If we are to be rationally authentic to our experienced purposes, we must retain the goal of knowing how the world is in a way that is the independent of our particular vantage point and limited frame of reference. In this regard, all consensus processes are not equivalent. Some of them, as found in science working at its best, can be seen to be rationally more likely to improve the validity of resulting beliefs. These are the ones that follow the Aschian epistemological morality. Consensus achieved where consensus itself has been the ultimate goal must be sharply distinguished from consensus discovered in the collaborative search for truth."

"There is an inescapable moral dimensions of human existence. It follows that investigation must take account of that proposition. Yet psychologists have been among the most determined opponents of this claim, predictably in the name of what they deem to be science. They hope, at least in their technical activities, to be above the fray."

"Most social acts have to be understood in their setting, and lose meaning if isolated. No error in thinking about social facts is more serious than the failure to see their place and function."

""I'm sorry I ever met you" is effective enough, but how much more piquant is the same communication expressed as: "I rue the day I met you"."

"I Could Never Have Sex With Any Man Who Has So Little Regard For My Husband."

"I've worked with Mankiewicz, Hawks, Kazan, Wyler, Wilder. I've been very fortunate. All of them work differently. I've even directed a couple of pictures, so I have respect for the work. But no matter what anyone says, it's a collaborative art form. I think the problem is that we've been contaminated by the European concept of the Auteur System. I've had movies where I bought the book, developed the script and cast the whole picture, but then the director walks in and says, "It must be a John Smith film." I think sometimes we emphasize that too much."

"I don't know if they have to care. I'm only concerned if they're interested in me. I don't care if you love me or hate me, but don't be indifferent to me. That to me is the worst thing."

"I find characters with a little evil in them much more interesting to play than the good guy. I'd rather play than ."

"Don't crucify me because of what your idea of a movie star is. I didn't start out to be a movie star. I started out to be an actor. You people out in the East have no idea what goes on out here. No awareness or knowledge whatsoever. You lose track of the human being behind the image of the movie star."

"Too often, I have not been what I wanted to be I've succumbed to pressures. Yes, I have. The things I've done that I liked, I've always done against advice. The bad films everybody was high on. The good films, they advised me against."

"Compared to Thoreau, Saint Francis of Assisi was peanuts."

"I renet it when I hear some of these young actors say they won't sell a picture. I've always felt that's part of my responsibility—to help getting people to see a movie. Funny thing is I don't even remember any of these young guy's names. I want to spank them."

"I know Italians and I like them. A lot of my father's best friends were Italians. I responded to that in making the picture. I put a lot of warmth into that character. Those immigrants were tough, more intensive than people are these days."

"The foreign directors are always fumbling about in obscurity, and the critics are always writing about the juxtaposition of black and white and the existential dilemma and all that shit, to disguise the fact that they don't understand the first damn thing about it either."