#usa

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

I could paint for a hundred years, a thousand years without stopping and I would still feel as though I knew nothing. ↗

— Paul Cezanne

#feel #hundred #i #knew #nothing

But always I regarded myself as one who was born in Jerusalem. ↗

— Shmuel Y. Agnon

#born #i #jerusalem #myself #regarded

Arnold Schwarzenegger's publicist told USA Today that the actor has not ruled out running for governor of California, saying that he will make a decision soon. Reportedly Arnold needs that time to learn how to pronounce "gubernatorial." ↗

— Jimmy Fallon

#arnold #california #decision #governor #how

I don't even read the papers. I read 'USA Today' because it has color photos. ↗

— Jimmy Fallon

#color #even #i #papers #photos

We were at Pye Studios for half an hour so we set the gear up and we did two tracks. A month later we found out it was selling thirty thousand copies a day. ↗

— Georgie Fame

#day #did #found #gear #half

Today osteoporosis affects more than 75 million people in the United States, Europe and Japan and causes more than 2.3 million fractures in the USA and Europe alone. ↗

— Gro Harlem Brundtland

#alone #causes #europe #japan #million

That's so different in Hong Kong when I'm using my own mother language, I can treat the line in one thousand different ways, with many different reactions. ↗

— Chow Yun-Fat

#different ways #hong #hong kong #i #i can

We've taken on the major health problems of the poorest - tuberculosis, maternal mortality, AIDS, malaria - in four countries. We've scored some victories in the sense that we've cured or treated thousands and changed the discourse about what is possible. ↗

— Paul Farmer

#aids #changed #countries #cured #discourse

Of thousands of others, nearer the centre of the explosion, there was no trace. They vanished. The theory in Hiroshima is that the atomic heat was so great that they burned instantly to ashes - except that there were no ashes. ↗

— Wilfred Burchett

#atomic #burned #centre #except #explosion