When it turned on the Jew, Christianity and European civilization turned on the incarnation - albeit an incarnation often wayward and unaware - of its own best hopes.

To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.

when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.

Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.

Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity

The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.

The Jew has his anchorage not in place but in time, in his highly developed sense of history as personal context. Six thousand years of self-awareness are a homeland.

I want you all to stand like the Muslims who stood with La ilaaha ilalla for Truth and Right

To be bold is to be wise enough to realize that fear is the energy that fuels action.

And verily for everything that a slave loses there is a substitute, but the one who loses Allah will never find anything to replace Him.

Who ever said that one was born just once?

I was admonished ot adopt feminine clothes; I refused, and still refuse. As for other avocations of women, there are plenty of other women to perform them.

She was the kind of gal that if she set her sights on a man, he'd be running in the opposite direction real quick.

It is the new and different that is always most vulnerable to market research.

Ideas are worthless if you can’t make them happen.

Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Jihadism have nothing to do with each other.