The inculcation of belief in the real existence of a common purpose is an essential executive function.

We of Es Toch tell a little myth, which says that in the beginning the Creator told a great lie. For there was nothing at all, but the Creator spoke, saying, It exists. And behold, in order that the lie of God might be God’s truth, the universe at once began to exist.

Eight and a half million New Yorkers will speak this new era into existence. It will be loud. It will be different. It will feel like the New York we love.
No matter how long you have called this city home, that love has shaped your life. I know that it has shaped mine.

What is the meaning of this?

The biblical evidence for the existence of purgatory is, shall we say, ‘creative’, again employing the common theological trick of vague, hand-waving analogy.

How surprising it is that the laws of nature and the initial conditions of the universe should allow for the existence of beings who could observe it. Life as we know it would be impossible if any one of several physical quantities had slightly different values.

Israel is there, it is part of the United Nations and we do not deny its existence. But we still have rights and land there which have been usurped and until these matters are dealt with we will withhold our recognition.

Virtue cannot dwell with wealth either in a city or in a house.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

What did today's sacrifices matter: the Universe lay ahead in the future. What did burnings at the stake and massacres matter? The Universe was somewhere else, always somewhere else! And it isn't anywhere: there are only men, men eternally divided.

When people laughed at him because he walked backward beneath the portico, he said to them: "Aren't you ashamed, you who walk backward along the whole path of existence, and blame me for walking backward along the path of the promenade?

Though the river's current never fails, the water passing, moment by moment, is never the same. Where the current pools, bubbles form on the surface, bursting and disappearing as others rise to replace them, none lasting long. In this world, people and their dwelling places are like that, always changing.

I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.

I [prefer] a short life with width to a narrow one with length.

We are, by astronomical standards, a pampered, cosseted, cherished group of creatures. … If the Universe had not been made with the most exacting precision we could never have come into existence. It is my view that these circumstances indicate the universe was created for man to live in.

Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.