“In our time... a man whose enemies are faceless bureaucrats almost never wins. It is our equivalent to the anger of the gods in ancient times. But those gods you must understand were far more imaginative than our tiny bureaucrats. They spoke from mountaintops not from tiny airless offices. They rode clouds. They were possessed of passion. They had voices and names. Six thousand years of civilization have brought us to this.”

“…everything has a past. Everything – a person, an object, a word, everything. If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future.”

“It's not a pretty world, Papa.''I've noticed,' my father said softly.”

“Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a 'universal' without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere.”

“But today we become aware of other readings of the human experience very quickly because of the media and the speed with which people travel the planet.”

“As a species we are always hungry for new knowledge.”

“All of us grow up in particular realities - a home, family, a clan, a small town, a neighborhood. Depending upon how we're brought up, we are either deeply aware of the particular reading of reality into which we are born, or we are peripherally aware of it.”

“Have thine own way, Lord! Have thine own way!Thou art the Potter and I am the clay.”

“In Russia I went to a great yeshiva, and in America I work in a carnival.”

“I sat near a window in our little synagogue and looked out at the large church and wondered how a statue whose face was so full of love could be worshipped by someone whose heart was so full of hate.”

“...a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something.”