Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now, make the burning building be Europe, and the luckless man underneath be the Palestinian Arabs. Is this a historical injustice? Has the man below been made a victim, with infinite cause of complaint and indefinite justification for violent retaliation? My own reply would be a provisional 'no,' but only on these conditions. The man leaping from the burning building must still make such restitution as he can to the man who broke his fall, and must not pretend that he never even landed on him. And he must base his case on the singularity and uniqueness of the original leap. It can't, in other words, be 'leap, leap, leap' for four generations and more. The people underneath cannot be expected to tolerate leaping on this scale and of this duration, if you catch my drift. In Palestine, tread softly, for you tread on their dreams. And do tell the Palestinians that they were never fallen upon and bruised in the first place. Do not shame yourself with the cheap lie that they were told by their leaders to run away. Also, stop saying that nobody knew how to cultivate oranges in Jaffa until the Jews showed them how. 'Making the desert bloom' one of Yvonne's stock phrases makes desert dwellers out of people who were the agricultural superiors of the Crusaders.

The man in our society is the breadwinner the woman has enough to do as the homemaker, wife and mother.

Dorothy Fields

Don't say that you want to give, but go ahead and give! You'll never catch up with a mere hope.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I've been such an oddball my whole life, but I've always been cool and I've always dressed fairly smartly.

Cee Lo Green

Any landing you can walk away from is a good one.

Proverb

Resolution One: I will live for God. Resolution Two: If no one else does, I still will.

Jonathan Edwards

The gods too are fond of a joke.

Aristotle

It is hard to miss the irony in the fact that the very same week that Republicans were publicly heralding Congressman Paul Ryan's plan to inject market forces into the American health care system, they were crafting a budget deal to strip them from the health reform law.

Ron Wyden

Did St Francis preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats.

Rebecca West, This Real Night

We must hold a man amenable to reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade. What business has he with an evil trade?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Kinkade estimated that one of his paintings hung in every twenty homes in America. Yet the art world unanimously ignores or reviles him. Me included.

Jerry Saltz

Telling a teenager the facts of life is like giving a fish a bath.

Arnold H. Glasow

The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.

Joseph Campbell