#pa

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

If you look back today over the last 25 years, it is a fact that we have had a progressive degeneration of our intelligence community in general; in particular in the field of human intelligence. ↗

— Paul Bremer

#community #degeneration #fact #field #general

But let's be clear. We're talking about a country where there's no opposition. As leader he can ignore Parliament and - sorry that's Tony Blair isn't it? Um, so he doesn't even have to ask the country before he goes to war - sorry that's still Tony Blair. ↗

— Rory Bremner

#ask #before #blair #clear #country

The high-grossing films are not all that interesting to me, I have to say. It's not stuff I would want to be in. Yes, you would want the big paycheck, but that's never really been my concern. ↗

— Edie Falco

#big #concern #films #i #interesting

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

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

If a man, for private profit, tears at the public news, does so with the impatience of one who thinks he actually owns the news you get, it is against the national interest. ↗

— Jimmy Breslin

#against #does #get #impatience #interest

It has always felt like a failure that Bjorn and I couldn't keep our family together. You never get it back, but to this day I don't regret splitting up. The reason behind our separation is one of those things I definitely don't want to go into! ↗

— Agnetha Faltskog

#back #behind #bjorn #day #definitely