Israel Quotes (6 quotes)
A world that did not lift a finger when Hitler was wiping out six million Jewish men, women, and children is now saying that the Jewish state of Israel will not survive if it does not come to terms with the Arabs. My feeling is that no one in this universe has the right and the competence to tell Israel what it has to do in order to survive. On the contrary, it is Israel that can tell us what to do. It can tell us that we shall not survive if we do not cultivate and celebrate courage, if we coddle traitors and deserters, bargain with terrorists, court enemies, and scorn friends.
In Before the Sabbath (1979), 6.
All sciences originated among the sons of Israel, the reason being the existence of prophecy among them which made their perfection in the sciences amazing.
— Averroes
In Benzion Netanyahu, Don Isaac Abravanel, Statesman and Philosopher (1953, 1998), 100. Footnote gives: See Abravanel’s Comm, on Gen., io.i (f. 48, col. 4). The corresponding passage in Happoint ha-Happalah (Hebrew translation of Averroes’ Destruction of the Destruction, by Kalonymos ben David ben Todros, Bodleian Library, Michael Collection, Ms. 293, ff. 137b-138a) is somewhat different. Abravanel might have used the other Hebrew translation (MS. in Leyden) of Averroes' work (cf. Steinschneider, Uebersetzungen, pp. 333-4).
I am by training a positivist, by inclination a pragmatist, in temperament a mystic, in practice a democrat; my faith Jewish, educated by Catholics, a habitual Protestant; born in Europe, raised in the Midwest, hardened in the East, softened in California and living in Israel.
Given as “said of himself”, in Eyal Diskin, 'Abraham Kaplan' in Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.), Encyclopaedia Judaica (2007).
Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau!
Mock on, mock on: 'Tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.
And every sand becomes a gem
Reflected in the beams divine;
Blown back they blind the mocking eye,
But still in Israel's paths they shine.
The atoms of Democritus
And Newton's particles of light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel's tents do shine so bright.
Mock on, mock on: 'Tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.
And every sand becomes a gem
Reflected in the beams divine;
Blown back they blind the mocking eye,
But still in Israel's paths they shine.
The atoms of Democritus
And Newton's particles of light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel's tents do shine so bright.
Notebook Drafts (c. 1804). In W. H. Stevenson (ed.), The Poems of William Blake (1971), 481.
The world looks marvelous from up here, so peaceful, so wonderful and so fragile. Everybody, all of us down there, not only in Israel, have to keep it clean and good.
( Israeli Air Force Colonel)
We have one great guiding principle which, like the pillar of cloud by day, and the pillar of fire by night, will conduct us, as Moses and the Israelites were once conducted, to an eminence from which we can survey the promised scientific future. That principle is the conservation of energy.
In 'What is Electricity?', Popular Science Monthly (Nov 1884), 26, 77.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
