#is

Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building—as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago—and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now, make the burning building be Europe, and the luckless man underneath be the Palestinian Arabs. Is this a historical injustice? Has the man below been made a victim, with infinite cause of complaint and indefinite justification for violent retaliation? My own reply would be a provisional 'no,' but only on these conditions. The man leaping from the burning building must still make such restitution as he can to the man who broke his fall, and must not pretend that he never even landed on him. And he must base his case on the singularity and uniqueness of the original leap. It can't, in other words, be 'leap, leap, leap' for four generations and more. The people underneath cannot be expected to tolerate leaping on this scale and of this duration, if you catch my drift. In Palestine, tread softly, for you tread on their dreams. And do not tell the Palestinians that they were never fallen upon and bruised in the first place. Do not shame yourself with the cheap lie that they were told by their leaders to run away. Also, stop saying that nobody knew how to cultivate oranges in Jaffa until the Jews showed them how. 'Making the desert bloom'—one of Yvonne's stock phrases—makes desert dwellers out of people who were the agricultural superiors of the Crusaders. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#analogies #arabs #colonialism #crusades #europe

It is my personal plan to assassinate by pistol either Richard Nixon or George Wallace. ↗

— Arthur Bremer

#either #george #nixon #personal #pistol

The common misconception is that as an actress you have to learn what you're doing. No, you just have to make the audience think you've learned it. ↗

— Edie Falco

#audience #common #doing #just #learn

I think we Americans, of all people, understand the importance of a good, legal, constitutional framework as the basis of political life. ↗

— Paul Bremer

#constitutional #framework #good #i #i think

I remember driving home one evening while they were reviewing the papers on the radio. One of the articles was about me separating from my wife. It's a weird thing to listen to a news report about the break-up of your marriage. ↗

— Rory Bremner

#articles #break-up #driving #evening #home

Or the Department of Education and another ministry were worried about duplication of effort, so what did they do? They set up two committees to look into duplication and neither knew what the other was up to. It really is a world beyond parody. ↗

— Rory Bremner

#another #beyond #committees #department #did

Constant repetition of tongue-twisters was like lifting weights for me, but patience and persistence have paid off. ↗

— Nicholas Brendon

#lifting #like #me #off #paid

I do not - I never believed it's better to kill a terrorist than to detain him. We want to detain as many terrorists as possible so we can elicit the intelligence from them in the appropriate manner so that we can disrupt follow-on terrorist attacks. ↗

— John O. Brennan

#attacks #believed #better #detain #disrupt

I also became interested in chemistry and gradually accumulated enough test tubes and other glassware to do chemical experiments, using small quantities of chemicals purchased from a pharmacy supply house. ↗

— Sydney Brenner

#became #chemical #chemicals #chemistry #enough

In 1995, I founded The Molecular Sciences Institute with a gift from the Philip Morris Company where I hoped that we could create an environment where young people could pursue science in an atmosphere of harmonious purpose and high intellectual challenge. ↗

— Sydney Brenner

#challenge #company #could #create #environment