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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 88637d8 | Functionally, a priest in the ancient world was one who could read and write. A kingdom of priests is therefore a nation of universal literacy. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 698e291 | Torah - God's law and teaching - was not a code written by a distant king, to be imposed by force. Nor was it an esoteric mystery understood by only a scholarly elite. It was to be available to, and intelligible by, everyone. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 15fa502 | A true parent is one who fights battles on our behalf when we are young and defenceless, but who, once we have matured, gives us the inner strength to fight for ourselves. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 7a1e280 | On Shabbat, all melakha, which is defined as "creative work," is forbidden. On Shabbat we are passive rather than active. We become creations, not creators. We renounce making in order to experience ourselves as made." | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| e301122 | A people driven by hate are not - cannot be - free. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 6215a2e | God is beyond time, but human beings live within time. We cannot take ourselves out of, say, the twenty-first century and project ourselves a thousand years from now. Inescapably, we live in the now, not eternity. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 379ca8a | Compare the Torah's treatment of free will with that of the great philosophical or scientific theories. For these other systems, freedom is almost invariably an either/or: either we are always free or we never are. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| f3cec95 | The belief that freedom is an all-or-nothing phenomenon - that we have it either all the time or none of the time - blinds us to the fact that there are degrees of freedom. It can be won and lost, and its loss is gradual. Unless the will is constantly exercised, it atrophies and dies. We then become objects, not subjects, swept along by tides of fashion, or the caprice of desire, or the passion that becomes an obsession. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 01cd889 | This is the question of questions for biblical faith. Paganism then, like secularism now, had no such doubt. Why should anyone expect justice in the world? The gods fought. They were indifferent to mankind. The universe was not moral. It was an arena of conflict. The strong win, the weak suffer, and the wise keep far from the fray. If there is no God or (what amounts to the same thing) many gods, there is no reason to expect justice. The qu.. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 6fc7d66 | A fundamental principle of Jewish leadership is intimated here for the first time: a leader does not need faith in himself, but he must have faith in the people he is to lead. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 5f8ab72 | Judaism is a protest: against empires, hierarchical social structures, and the beliefs that held them in place. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 6662f9d | Sacrifice is at the heart of both politics and family. Both parent and citizen understand themselves as subject to a demand for sacrifice. They recognise the demand as legitimate because they live in the world of meanings that the sacrificial act affirms. Sacrifice is, accordingly, the way of being in a meaningful world. Sacrifice, we say, is an act of love. In love, we are willing to sacrifice, and through that sacrifice we simultaneously .. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 3fa0707 | One of the more surprising things about lashon hara, evil speech, in Judaism, is that it refers to speech that is true. False speech, libel, or slander, are something else and fall under a different prohibition. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 4f9392d | This paradox suggests that Judaism has a different understanding of language than the one that prevails in the West and had its origins in ancient Greece. The philosophers, heirs to the Greeks, tended to think of language as conveying information. What matters is whether it is true or false. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 394254a | All social animals need to find ways of keeping the group together, managing disputes, appeasing frayed emotions, helping individuals within the group recover their poise after a bruising encounter. Primates do this by grooming, stroking one another. But this degree of intimacy is possible only in a relatively small group. Humans, by using language as a substitute for embrace, can manage more relationships and thus build larger groups. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 1bf7dab | speech was seen in Judaism not simply as a means of conveying information, though it is that as well, but also and essentially as a means of holding the group together without coercive force. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| e013d8e | Evil speech kills three people: the one who says it, the one who listens to it, and the one about whom it is said. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| d8d0b9c | My thesis that the practice of non-violence requires belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologians in the West. To the person who is inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone.... Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and levelled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, w.. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 224cd7c | That is because speech is much more than the conveying of information. It is the substance of relationship, and when this is poisoned, trust and the social bond are undermined. We use the phrase "character assassination" precisely because some form of violence is being committed, even if it is verbal rather than physical." | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 61e0cce | the truth that there is not one single system that can do justice to the moral life. What we need is a combination of several. Attempt to reduce them to "one very simple principle," in John Stuart Mill's phrase, and you will fail to do justice to morality itself." | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| b88c376 | The concept of equality we find in the Torah specifically and Judaism generally is not an equality of wealth: Judaism is not communism. Nor is it an equality of power: Judaism is not anarchy. It is fundamentally an equality of dignity. We are all equal citizens in the nation whose sovereign is God. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 209b572 | Holiness belongs to all of us when we turn our lives into the service of God, and society into a home for the Divine Presence. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 3b5df63 | as Katharine Hepburn majestically said to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we were put on earth to rise above." | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 9f09306 | The rabbinic account of how God taught Adam and Eve the secret of making fire is the precise opposite of the story of Prometheus. God seeks to confer dignity on the beings He made in His image as an act of love. He does not hide the secrets of the universe from us. He does not seek to keep mankind in a state of ignorance or dependence. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 6556273 | Dependence breeds neither cordiality nor respect. - Pg. 77 | dependence respect | David Hewson | |
| 31acd0b | Mine was the shortest. | Joseph Delaney | ||
| 8be9a21 | In order to survive, Tom and the Spook must form an alliance with Grimalkin, the deadly witch assassin of the most powerful of the Pendle clans. | Joseph Delaney | ||
| 6cd8f6c | Bryony | Joseph Delaney | ||
| a9f2f39 | She was holding the Starblade. It was Alice. | Joseph Delaney | ||
| 440cfd3 | failed. I'm weary--weary | Joseph Delaney | ||
| 482eff4 | What on earth could be worse than a malevolent witch?' I demanded. 'I belong to the best bit of the dark... I'm an earth-witch who serves Pan. My magic comes from the ground; it comes from the elements; it comes from the Earth itself. The truth is, that's what I was always meant to be. | Joseph Delaney | ||
| a653244 | We three alone have the speed, skill and power to do what must be done', said Grimalkin. 'You have the Destiny Blade and Bone Cutter -- in addition to the talents inherited from your mother. Alice wields powerful magic, and I am Grimalkin. | power self-confidence spook-s-books the-wardstone-chronicles | Joseph Delaney | |
| 5570cbc | My name is Slither. | Joseph Delaney | ||
| 1d6ab1c | When Golgoth finally left this place, these fragments would thaw, just as Morgan's had. I had to acknowledge that Grimalkin was dead. | Joseph Delaney | ||
| 0b221af | My life only began the day I was apprenticed to Tom Ward. - Jenny, in her diary | Joseph Delaney | ||
| 2c30ed8 | Why does it have to be like this? Why does life have to be so short, with all the good things passing quickly. Is it worth living at all? | Joseph Delaney | ||
| 9b1912e | Whatever it cost, I had to do what was right. Better oblivion. Better to be nothing than live to experience that. | Joseph Delaney | ||
| 94626fc | Alice was standing in the gloom, with just the toes of her pointy shoes poking out into the sunlight. | Joseph Delaney | ||
| 3b6590b | I'll find nobody for you, witch!" the man retorted." | Joseph Delaney | ||
| 3bad166 | For a moment I envied them their religion. They were lucky to have something they could all believe in together. | Joseph Delaney | ||
| de329cb | Getting money out of some people was harder than getting blood from a stone. | Joseph Delaney | ||
| 3e22dbc | They were tucking into big plates of bacon and eggs | Joseph Delaney | ||
| 50c5faf | When the good die, it sometimes unshackles evil that would otherwise have been kept in check! | Joseph Delaney | ||
| 9bb3522 | Believe that you can do something and half the battle is won before you start." -Bill Arkwright" | self-esteem win | Joseph Delaney |