The Human Scale Quotes

“They were young, just married, they knew many in Vilnius who were not Jews. Friends. Neighbors. Came the Nazis with their death squads, but those same friends and neighbors did the job for them. They killed Jews in the town square. They killed them in their houses. They tied them up and drowned them in the river. They made the Jews dig pits and then shot them in their graves. Those few who tried to protect the Jews were also killed. They taught the Nazis not to neglect killing the women and children. They called this slaughter de-Jewification. Nowhere in Europe was the killing so complete. There were two hundred thousand Jews in Lithuania in 1941 and four years later only a handful survived, including my parents.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Human Scale: A Novel

“He thought once again how weakness becomes dangerous when it seeks strength as a solution. Victims of oppression believe that their salvation is to become stronger than their enemy, more committed, more pious, and more ruthless, until they turn into the pitiless enemy that lives in their imagination. Lambs turn into”
― Lawrence Wright, The Human Scale: A Novel

“Peace is the acceptance of mutual surrender. Anything less is merely a truce.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Human Scale: A Novel

“of a grief that is too big for us, too big for any people. And then we made the Palestinians in our image, a grieving and dispossessed people.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Human Scale: A Novel

“Grief. Israel was created by a grieving people. If we had dealt with that, if we had accepted our suffering, we might have found happiness, if such a thing exists for a nation. But we let our grief define us. All this rage, this depression, shame, this insistence on revenge—they are expressions”
― Lawrence Wright, The Human Scale: A Novel

“of history suggested that holiness was magnified superstition, used mainly as an excuse for savagery. The Holy Land had been fought over through the millennia more than any other acreage in the world, one army after another, one belief against another, all in the effort to own God.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Human Scale: A Novel

“According to the Mishnah—a collection of ancient Jewish traditions—“Every moment that one delays in freeing captives, where it is possible to expedite their freedom, is tantamount to murder.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Human Scale: A Novel

“But to watch is not to see.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Human Scale: A Novel

“He despised the violent aggression of the settlers, especially the Kahanists, but he also recognized the threat posed by jihadist groups. He didn’t see a moral difference between them, only a power imbalance. The settlers didn’t represent all Israelis, nor did Hamas represent all Palestinians, but neither side worked to eliminate the violent actors inside their communities; instead, the extremists were tolerated, even elected to high office. They served a purpose, and the purpose was to prolong the conflict, justify the hatred, and rid the land of the other.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Human Scale: A Novel

“This is what the word ‘Islam’ means, to surrender. It is understood as submission to the will of God, not the Jews, but I believe this passivity is crucial to achieving peace. Okay, it is also because Muslims have been trained not to resist that we have such a problem with dictatorships. Everywhere you look in the Islamic world we have them, these monsters, most of them military, some of them religious, but we surrender to them. We talk about democracy, about human rights, but we do not fight for these qualities. Jews we fight against because they are colonialists. We’d rather be governed badly by Arabs than treated well by Jews.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Human Scale: A Novel

“Our hearts are divided between joy and sorrow. We have so much sorrow we need to make more room for happiness.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Human Scale: A Novel

“I just want to say how grateful I am to meet all of you,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to make the journey to visit my father’s homeland. He told me that when I finally came to the Holy Land I would find much of value. Since my parents passed away, I haven’t had a family, but now I realize that there was always one waiting for me.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Human Scale: A Novel

“The decisive question is this: Can we implement a policy to show the Arabs that it is better for them to reach a peace settlement or at least a ceasefire because wars with us will cost them dearly and they will not achieve their goal?” It was a question that remained unanswered.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Human Scale: A Novel

“Hopelessness is the goal, Yossi thought, the result of the perpetual Israeli delusion that a population can be suppressed to the point that it finally accepts total defeat. Jews should know how impossible it is to finally extinguish a people. They will inevitably rise again, stronger, fiercer, with history on their side.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Human Scale: A Novel

“She set the gun down. So much of Israel is a contradiction, she thought. Yes, it was a miracle, the salvation of the Jewish people, but in the process we have imposed our history on another people, with the ghettos, the diaspora, the pogroms—one victimized people subjugating another, helplessly, unable to stop ourselves. In that instant, alone in the dark, Sara had a sudden flash of identity, like an unexpected reflection in a window. To be Israeli was to acknowledge the implacable darkness of human nature. It was to know the feeling of a weapon in your hand and to be ready to kill without hesitation.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Human Scale: A Novel

“All that said, Sara was viscerally opposed to the occupation. She rarely spoke about politics with her father. Invariably, it turned into a subtle attack on who he was, although that was never her intention. She saw him as a good man carrying out a morally indefensible job that was also essential to protecting the lives of Israeli citizens. Her real anger was at the government.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Human Scale: A Novel

“But she couldn’t imagine them carrying the moral burden that her father did, existing in the contradiction that history had imposed on the Israelis, victims with blood on their hands, constantly having to weigh justice against survival.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Human Scale: A Novel

“Religious mania was different from cause-oriented fanatics, like animal-rights or climate-change activists, nothing wrong with causes so long as they didn’t take over your life. But religious literalism was untethered to any reality except the word of God.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Human Scale: A Novel

“A rule of thumb in the region is that whenever peace seems near, a spoiler will arise.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Human Scale: A Novel

“Through the connivance of Israeli businessmen close to the intelligence community, hundreds of millions of Palestinian tax dollars and foreign aid were skimmed and deposited in secret accounts held by Arafat and his cronies, much of it in Bank Leumi in Tel Aviv. Everyone knew the leadership was corrupt, and that knowledge demoralized the Palestinian people, who had no one else to turn to.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Human Scale: A Novel