A people always ends by resembling its shadow.
The emphasis has been on rights, not responsibilities. When it comes to piecing together the fragments of broken lives, we have tended to place the entire burden on the state and its agencies.
The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognize God's image in someone who is not in my image, who language, faith, ideal, are different from mine? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing him to remake me in his.
Some years ago there was a study to discover the most stressful occupation. It turned out not to be the head of a large business, football manager or prime minister, but rather: bus driver.
Make space in your life for the things that matter, for family and friends, love and generosity, fun and joy. Without this, you will burn out in mid-career and wonder where your life went.
Anti-Semitism is best understood as a virus. It has no logic. Jews were hated because they were rich and because they were poor; because they were capitalists and because they were communists; because they held tenaciously to an ancient faith and because they were rootless cosmopolitans, believing nothing. Hate needs no logic. It is a sickness of the soul.
Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.
There must be religion. When that ligament is torn, society is disjointed and its members perish. . . [T]he most important of all lessons is the denunciation of ruin to every state that rejects the precepts of religion.
I just wanted to make sure that yes, that those horror - they worked as a genre. To me, I just wanted to be touched by the film in the way that I saw plausible. Which is the story about compassion - giving and receiving it in those desperate times of need.
To transform breakdowns into breakthroughs is the whole function of a master.
Over a year before I started recording Salad Days, so I finally sat down and was like I have to do this. And it did feel like a chore. I was looking at it in a completely wrong way, trying to one up myself. Just the typical sophomore album bullshit. The main thing I got out of it is I eventually gave up on all that stuff. I had to re-learn why I liked making music in the first place, why I liked recording in my room all the time. Because it's fun. It's fun for me.