Jews

""For the commandment is a lamp" [Prov. 6.23]. And the spark which kindles the commandment is devotion."

"They are all so-called Christian nations, but... this superimposed religion... does not penetrate into the core of their souls. It has no relation to their daily experience... It is a key to open a heaven after death and not a key with which to force open the portals of this life."

"[Christianity] is a denial of this world, a severance from reality, an abdication, a means of redemption from, not for, life."

"Children... constitute man's eternity."

"The bigger the merchant the smaller the Jew."

"We take a drink only for the sake of the benediction."

"Ugliness is the greatest of all sins."

"I want to soar the boundless blue Where winds and tempests have their birth, And let the clouds conceal for me Not heaven, but the earth."

"Youth is fair, a graceful stag, Leaping, playing in a park. Age is gray, a toothless hag, Stumbling in the dark."

"Purim is the birthday of the first Schutz-Jude, the first Jewish toady to foreign royalty."

"In the second and third exiles we have served as a living protest against greed and hate, against physical force, against "might makes right"!"

""May all unite to do Thy will with a perfect heart!"… Thus prays the Jew. Have you more beautiful prayers to offer?"

"Prayer sometimes dulls the hunger of the pauper, like a mother's finger thrust into the mouth of her starving baby."

"We should get out of the ghetto, but we should get out as Jews, with our own spiritual treasures. We should interchange, give and take, but not beg. Ghetto is impotence. Cultural cross-fertilization is the only possibility for human development."

"At the Throne of Glory it is not the nobly-born that are beloved, but the nobly-risen."

"There are melodies that must have words... and melodies that sing themselves without words. The latter are of a higher grade. But these, too, depend on a voice and lips,... hence are not yet altogether pure, not yet genuine spirit. Genuine melody sings itself without a voice. It sings inside, within the heart, in man's very entrails!"

"A Jew waits for Messiah to come and redeem the world from fear and pain, from the cataclysmic conflicts between rich and poor. All shall enjoy the earth. This means, in popular imagination, that bread and clothes shall grow, ready-made, on trees. Do you have more winged ideals?"

"The ancient Greeks and Romans tell of a golden age in the past.... Our Messiah alone belongs to the future. He still has to make his appearance, and not solely for the benefit of his own people. The whole world must be judged and redeemed."

"A heap of bricks is not yet a house."

"Wash me O Lord for my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned, and done this evil in your sight. That you may be found just when you speak, and blameless when you judge."

"Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, but whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night. That person is like a treek planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither— whatever they do prospers"

"Saul is eventually overthrown by his son-in-law David, who absorbs the southern tribes of Judah, conquers Jerusalem, and makes it the capital of a kingdom that will last four centuries. David would come to be celebrated in story, song, and sculpture, and his six-pointed star would symbolize his people for three thousand years. Christians too would revere him as the forerunner of Jesus. But in Hebrew scripture David is not just the “sweet singer of Israel,” the chiseled poet who plays a harp and composes the Psalms. After he makes his name by killing Goliath, David recruits a gang of guerrillas, extorts wealth from his fellow citizens at swordpoint, and fights as a mercenary for the Philistines. These achievements make Saul jealous: the women in his court are singing, “Saul has killed by the thousands, but David by the tens of thousands.” So Saul plots to have him assassinated. David narrowly escapes before staging a successful coup. When David becomes king, he keeps up his hard-earned reputation for killing by the tens of thousands. After his general Joab “wasted the country of the children of Ammon,” David “brought out the people that were in it, and cut them with saws, and with harrows of iron, and with axes.” Finally he manages to do something that God considers immoral: he orders a census. To punish David for this lapse, God kills seventy thousand of his citizens."

"Whenever love depends on some selfish end, when the end passes away, the love passes away; but if it does not depend on some selfish end, it will never pass away. Which love depended on a selfish end? This was the love of Amnon and Tamar. And which did not depend on a selfish end? This was the love of David and Jonathan."

"Thou art the man."

"(Also he bade them teach the children of Judah the use of the bow: behold, it is written in the book of Jasher.) The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen! Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon; lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph. Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither let there be rain, upon you, nor fields of offerings: for there the shield of the mighty is vilely cast away, the shield of Saul, as though he had not been anointed with oil. From the blood of the slain, from the fat of the mighty, the bow of Jonathan turned not back, and the sword of Saul returned not empty. Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided: they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions. Ye daughters of Israel, weep over Saul, who clothed you in scarlet, with other delights, who put on ornaments of gold upon your apparel. How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! O Jonathan, thou wast slain in thine high places. I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women. How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished!"

"And as soon as the lad was gone, David arose out of a place toward the south, and fell on his face to the ground, and bowed himself three times: and they kissed one another, and wept one with another, until David exceeded."

"And Jonathan made a covenant with David because he loved him as himself. Jonathan took off the robe he was wearing and gave it to David, along with his tunic, and even his sword, his bow and his belt."

"בני אבשלום בני בני אבשלום מי יתן מותי אני תחתיך אבשלום בני בני"

"Thou comest to me with a sword, and with A spear, and with a shield: but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom thou hast defied. [...] And all this assembly shall know that the Lord saveth not with the sword and spear: for the battle is the Lord's, and he will give you into our hands."

"Thy servant kept his father's sheep, and there came a lion, and a bear, and took a lamb out of the flock: [...] The Lord that delivered me out of the paw of the lion, and out of the paw of the bear, he will deliver me out of the hand of this Philistine."

"I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother; you were very dear to me. Your love for me was wonderful, more wonderful than that of women."

"Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, lead me in the way everlasting."

"If you want me to say it simplistically, I'm proud that this nobody from nowhere became the center of Western tradition."

"You may search through all the great literature of the world and you will find no words extolling marital infidelities. While it is true that the “sins of the flesh” have always been more readily forgiven to husbands than to wives, all human societies have taken a very harsh view of men who seduce—or rape—the wives or daughters of the men of their own society. When the Trojan, Paris, ran off with Helen, wife of the Greek King Menaleus, Greece fought a seven-year war against Troy, to protest the seduction and abduction of Helen. King David’s abduction and seduction of Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, the Hittite, scandalized his court. It also caused that God-fearing monarch great agonies of repentance. In passing, King David’s repentance produced some of the world’s greatest poetry—perhaps, an early proof of Sigmund Freud’s theory that all the creative works of man—all his art, poetry, architecture, even his proclivity for moneymaking, political power, and Empire building, are au fond, sublimations of his consciously or subconsciously repressed sexual desires."

"Still, sports history is filled with famous trash talkers. One well-known athlete, a young man named David, was able to use a verbal attack to his benefit in a battle with a heavily favored foe. "I will strike you down and cut off your head," David proclaims to his much larger enemy, Goliath, in the first chapter of the biblical book of Samuel. And the rest is trash-talking history."

"Vicit Leo de tribu Juda, radix David."

"The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery. People enslave, rape, and murder members of their immediate families. Warlords slaughter civilians indiscriminately, including the children. Women are bought, sold, and plundered like sex toys. And Yahweh tortures and massacres people by the hundreds of thousands for trivial disobedience or for no reason at all. These atrocities are neither isolated nor obscure. They implicate all the major characters of the Old Testament, the ones that Sunday-school children draw with crayons. And they fall into a continuous plotline that stretches for millennia, from Adam and Eve through Noah, the patriarchs, Moses, Joshua, the judges, Saul, David, Solomon, and beyond. According to the biblical scholar Raymund Schwager, the Hebrew Bible “contains over six hundred passages that explicitly talk about nations, kings, or individuals attacking, destroying, and killing others. . . . Aside from the approximately one thousand verses in which Yahweh himself appears as the direct executioner of violent punishments, and the many texts in which the Lord delivers the criminal to the punisher’s sword, in over one hundred other passages Yahweh expressly gives the command to kill people.” Matthew White, a self-described atrocitologist who keeps a database with the estimated death tolls of history’s major wars, massacres, and genocides, counts about 1.2 million deaths from mass killing that are specifically enumerated in the Bible. (He excludes the half million casualties in the war between Judah and Israel described in 2 Chronicles 13 because he considers the body count historically implausible.) The victims of the Noachian flood would add another 20 million or so to the total. The good news, of course, is that most of it never happened. Not only is there no evidence that Yahweh inundated the planet and incinerated its cities, but the patriarchs, exodus, conquest, and Jewish empire are almost certainly fictions. Historians have found no mention in Egyptian writings of the departure of a million slaves (which could hardly have escaped the Egyptians’ notice); nor have archaeologists found evidence in the ruins of Jericho or neighboring cities of a sacking around 1200 BCE. And if there was a Davidic empire stretching from the Euphrates to the Red Sea around the turn of the 1st millennium BCE, no one else at the time seemed to have noticed it."

"Within the royal family, sex and violence go hand in hand. While taking a walk on the palace roof one day, David peeping-toms a naked woman, Bathsheba, and likes what he sees, so he sends her husband to be killed in battle and adds her to his seraglio. Later one of David’s children rapes another one and is killed in revenge by a third. The avenger, Absalom, rounds up an army and tries to usurp David’s throne by having sex with ten of his concubines. (As usual, we are not told how the concubines felt about all this.) While fleeing David’s army, Absalom’s hair gets caught in a tree, and David’s general thrusts three spears into his heart. This does not put the family squabbles to an end. Bathsheba tricks a senile David into anointing their son Solomon as his successor. When the legitimate heir, David’s older son Adonijah, protests, Solomon has him killed."

"I was born Jewish. I received the name of my paternal grandfather, Aaron. Having become Christian by faith and baptism, I have remained Jewish. As did the Apostles."

"I was born Jewish and so I remain, even if that’s unacceptable for many. For me, the vocation of Israel is bringing light to the goyim. That’s my hope and I believe that Christianity is the means for achieving it."

"Greed is all right, by the way. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself."

"I think "immoral" is probably the wrong word to use...I prefer the word "unethical"."

"What good is the moon if you can't buy or sell it?"

"You'll never get me into a tux. Not until I'm dead and I have no choice because that's what the undertaker put me in."

"For a while, I was friends with Danny Elfman. He is certainly talented and has done some great music for film. But after talking with him several times when I was having trouble dealing with a movie producer or the agents that we shared, I realized his true genius was dealing with these people."

"It'll say, 'Danny Elfman, who wrote the theme to 'The Simpsons,' etcetera...That's what I'll be remembered for."

"We don't wanna leave you, but...but we got to...wish this point right here, wish it could last forever right now! Yeah...it's kinda like one big orgasm!"

"I have traveled many times outside Iran, and have discussed the issue [of the Iranian nuclear project]. I have been asked for my opinion and that of the Iranian Jewish community, and I have always emphasized that the Iranian people has the right to obtain nuclear technology and energy for peaceful purposes. The Iranian people must not give up this right under any circumstances - and indeed, it will not."

"I have always emphasized that the Iranian people has the right to obtain nuclear technology and energy for peaceful purposes."

"Preach the word, be urgent in season and out of season, convince, rebuke, and exhort, be unfailing in patience and in teaching."