Steve > Steve's Quotes

“Awe rather than faith is the cardinal attitude of the religious Jew.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism

“Replete is the world with a spiritual radiance, replete with sublime and marvelous secrets. But a small hand held against the eye hides it all,” said the Baal Shem.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism

“SWIGERT provided a list of 12 SERE techniques for possible use by the CIA: (1) the attention grasp, (2) walling, (3) facial hold, (4) facial slap, (5) cramped confinement, (6) wall standing, (7) stress positions, (8) sleep deprivation, (9) waterboard, (10) use of diapers, (11) use of insects, and (12) mock burial.136”
― Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture: Complete Standard Reflowable Flexible Ebook Edition

“although minute quantities of chlorine are life-saving, if too much is inhaled in its gaseous form, it can cause death in under thirty minutes. Recently, the Syrian government has used chlorine directly against civilians as a chemical weapon. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has thus transformed a principal element of public health into a tool of both disease and terror.”
― Anonymous

“I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you: yea, who knoweth not such things as these?"—Job xii. 3.”
― Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

“I can't bear that they,and everybody, should think people wicked because they may have chosen to live their own way!It is really these opinions that make the best intentioned people reckless, and actually become immoral!”
― Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

“Like Jefferson, Brandeis believed that the greatest threat to our constitutional liberties was an uneducated citizenry, and that democracy could not survive both ignorant and free. And”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet

“my life question should not be “What do I want to receive?” but “Who do I want to be?” I realized that what mattered more than acquisition was character development.”
― Rabbi Dr. Shmuly Yanklowitz, Pirkei Avot: A Social Justice Commentary

“Our existential quest, then, is to transcend the distractions of meaningless digital ephemera that have become our companions and to regain the virtues of true friendship.”
― Rabbi Dr. Shmuly Yanklowitz, Pirkei Avot: A Social Justice Commentary

“People are rotten everywhere you go. They’re no good. You want to see a very bad man? Make an ordinary man successful beyond his imagination. Let’s see how good he is when he can do whatever he wants.”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“Ethics isn’t just a drag on innovation; properly handled, it can fertilise new ideas as well as weed out bad ones.”
― Cennydd Bowles, Future Ethics

“Consequently, racism is the most slovenly of predictive models. It is powered by haphazard data gathering and spurious correlations, reinforced by institutional inequities, and polluted by confirmation bias”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“When any of us surfs the Web, when we do a search or make a purchase, or even when a Turkish, Egyptian, or Russian dissident communicates via Skype or FaceTime, we leave behind us fingerprints that Big Brother will use in any way that pleases him, whether it is to cash in or clamp down.”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Empire and the Five Kings: America's Abdication and the Fate of the World

“List any ten speeds for time: summer morning, winter dusk, boring lecture, first time making love with woman you actually really love, drunkenness, moment of death, car crash, heart attack, any and all meetings of more than seven people, childhood, and not one happens at the same speed as the others, some are blindingly fast and over instantly and others drone and moan on until you contemplate removing your spleen with a pepper shaker just for entertainment’s sake.”
― Brian Doyle, Mink River

“But I believe it is an error to wonder about what you do not know, at the expense of savoring the excellence of what you do know.”
― Brian Doyle, Mink River

“Vaclav Smil writes: “The diffusion and complexification of human societies have led to a large array of environmental changes that have transformed this planet during the past 5 ka, and particularly during the past 100 years, more rapidly than any other biogenic process in the planet’s history” [22, p. 240].”
― David C. Krakauer, History, Big History, & Metahistory

“The great do the impossible—the small do What everyone can”
― Tiruvalluvar, The Kural: Tiruvalluvar's Tirukkural

“Nothing gains more than virtue—nothing destroys more Than forgetting it”
― Tiruvalluvar, The Kural: Tiruvalluvar's Tirukkural

“Every pathological disturbance, every therapeutic effect, finds its ultimate explanation only when it’s possible to designate the specific living cellular elements involved.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“The mind’s eye can nowhere find more brilliant splendour and more tenebrous gloom than in man. It cannot set its gaze on anything more fearsome, more complicated, more mysterious and infinite.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“If there is anything more heart-breaking than a body starving for want of bread, it is a hungry soul dying for want of enlightenment.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Rabbi Yeruham Levovitz (1873–1936): “Woe to a person who is unaware of their shortcomings, because they will not know what to work on. But even greater woe to a person who is unaware of their virtues, because they don’t even know what they have to work with.”
― Shai Held, Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life

“October 7 marks the alignment, for the worse, of Israel with the diaspora. The two paths of Judaism are now on the same footing and are intersecting. And the material and spiritual Jewish strength that is essential to the survival of real Jews, as I argued in The Genius of Judaism, has revealed its hidden weakness. There is nowhere in the world where Jews are safe; that is the message. No land on this planet is a shelter for Jews; that is what the Event of October 7 proclaims. Never and nowhere will it be possible to say that Jews can live in the world the way the French live in France, the English in England, and the Americans in America—and that will be true until the end of time: such is the obvious truth.”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, Israel Alone

“The flowers are large and pure white in color. Seeing them fall evokes the opening to The Tale of the Heike: The sound of the Gion Shōja bells echoes the impermanence of all things; the color of the sala flowers reveals the truth that the prosperous must decline. They bloom, and then, in the evening, they fall.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, The Rainbow

“Don’t dwell too much on worry. Life brings tears at times, joy at others.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, The Rainbow

“listening that introduced me to the invisible cord that runs through all human beings, only felt when we dare to open our hearts to each other.”
― Mark Nepo, You Don't Have to Do It Alone: The Power of Friendship

“In truth, though millions have come and gone before us, no one knows how to live or how to make sense of the arduous journey of being alive. It only gets easy when we care for each other and dare to share what we see and perceive in the midst of beauty or pain.”
― Mark Nepo, You Don't Have to Do It Alone: The Power of Friendship