Treasury of Thought
Observations Over Half a Century
Where there are stronger
always stand with the weaker!
A
ABHORRENCE: The crime they abhor in generations gone, they overlook in their own, because its commission is veiled by a camouflage of contemporary civilization.
ABILITY: Is measured not by the greatness of the talent but by the purpose for which it is employed.
ABNORMAL: All great ideas and all great actors on the stage of history were abnormal. Was Beethoven normal? Or Michelangelo? Da Vinci, Socrates, or Mohammed?
They all went off the norm, driving themselves incessantly for what they thought was vital and essential. You may call them neurotics, if you wish. Surely their response to given impulses was undue, strikingly undue, in the eyes of living mediocrities.
——The nights of the truly outstanding are inhabited by demons, idols and visions. But without their fantasies and dreams, what a dull place the normal era would be.
——Treat gently the abnormal; he may carry some subtle talent under the cloud of his peculiarities.
ABOLITIONISM: The white man took willingly the black man as burden, but hesitates to take him as friend.
ABSENCE: Makes a good seasoning but a poor staple.
——Absence increases fondness—and ends in forgetfulness.
THE ABSOLUTE: As far as morals are concerned, what matters is only our awareness that they are relative to time, place and government.
ABSTINENCE: If our authorities were really willing and capable of arresting all persons who ever have engaged in sexual practices with others than their married spouses, there would be very few left above the teen age who might justly escape indictment.
I certainly do not advocate promiscuity, but I state the above fact to establish that though “non-married” sexuality may often be in bad taste and muddled emotionally, sex per se is no crime as abstinence per se is no virtue.
ACCEPTANCE: By hasty multitudes is a point against rather than for an ism.
ACCIDENTS: Man proposes—and a blind goddess disposes.
ACTIONS: Speak loud but sometimes a whisper is more welcome.
——Wisdom without action is no better than day-dreaming. I don’t think much of the day dreamer who fancies himself a formidable hero, nor of sagacity that remains unmoved by the iniquities of the day.
ACTIVISM: To take a position in life you have to do more than just think. You have to be doing. Be it approval or disapproval you cannot clap only one hand.
ADHERENCE: Preconceived notions are the hardest to give up.
ADJUSTMENT: The adjusted are so completely oriented within themselves that nothing can penetrate that wall of egocentricity except what they chew and digest.
ADMIRATION: Is a balm when known, an offense when shown.
——Who fails to admire will never love.
ADOLESCENCE: Neither infancy nor childhood, but adolescence is decisive in the making of man. The tastes, physical and mental, fostered in those days will determine the rest of the living years.
ADVENTURE: Nothing is more intriguing than the soul of a fellow man.
——Man will search for starlings in foreign lands and pay no heed to the lark at home.
——The greatest adventures are experienced in the soul of man, not across oceans or deserts.
ADVERSITY: Is God’s helpmate and the Devil’s handmaiden.
ADVICE: Is poor service indeed if given by those who lack sense of direction.
——Advice should be given by the example of the accomplished not by one’s own meagre experience.
ADVISERS: Fools are ever ready advisers.
AFFECTATION: They act like characters in a book, only they read the wrong book.
AFFECTION: Affection is the only cure for a lonely soul.
AGE: Is but one step from youth. Let the flippant remember they may even fumble that one.
——Age is a time for work, since most of the pleasures of youth have guttered out.
——Man’s true age lies in the life span ahead of him, not the span behind him.
——Age is no cause for veneration. An old crocodile is still a menace and an old crow sings not like a nightingale.
——Age is wasted on the tired. It is the most precious time of life.
——Wisdom grows with the years but not in a barren soul.
——Gray hair is a sign of age, not wisdom.
——Some days we are ten years older than on others.
——A fool gets more hardened with age, a wise man gentler.
——The greatest tragedy of old age is to live on into a generation without peers.
——When we are young, we are many people; when we are old, we are only one.
——The later years of life are not the declining but rather the inclining years—inclining to serenity, maturity, understanding and tolerance. Life in its fullness is reserved for maturity; still, youth craves more frolic and cheer. Hope and confidence make for the young even a drab world panorama appear full of color and promise.
The makers of a better world were never the young, always the mature. See: Rousseau, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Tolstoy, Jefferson, Socrates, Moses, Pestalozzi, Spinoza, Gandhi, Lessing.
——It is folly to expect of youth the making of a better tomorrow; there will be no better tomorrow unless we make it today.
AGGRESSION: How quick the sand of life runs out, and even the wasting is made doleful by man’s impatient eristics.
——Is carried by the fever of hate, and this fever finds its way into the heart and the minds of the people, but it originates always in the blackness of dictatorial avarice.
AGNOSTIC: A timid person attempting to hide his insecurity under a metaphysical cloak. He is gnostic about himself but agnostic about everything else.
——Agnostics admit that the true nature of God eludes them, as it does all men; the cleric covers his doubts with a seminary certificate.
AGRICULTURE: Is a profession, not a way of life.
AHIMSA: This, the Hindu principle of non-killing of cows and other animals, has led to the killing of hundreds of thousands of Indian Moslems who ignored it. How often a religious tenet so drifts away from the original spirit that it leads to its opposite.
ALCHEMY: Superstition of yesteryear is the science of today. What science of our time will be the superstition of tomorrow? Laugh not at yesterday; tomorrow may have the laugh on you.
ALCOHOLISM: Society’s legitimized drug addiction.
——A society that grows fat on liquor taxes has little moral justification to become violently legalistic about dry intoxication. For every delinquent pulling a knife because of heroin, there are ten thousand who do it because of whiskey. For every automobile accident caused by drugged lethargy, there are a thousand caused by whiskey. For every bodily debility created by morphinism, there are a hundred induced by alcoholism.
ALIKE: Like the leaves on a tree, we are all alike and yet all different.
ALMS: Were the early expression of social consciousness. The man who refused giving them is the cynic of our era.
AMATEUR: It is by the quality of his mistakes that you recognize the amateur.
AMBITION: Is a mongrel seed. You never know what will come of it until it is too late: the tree of life or poison ivy.
——Great ambition has sometimes destroyed the one it possessed, but raised mankind a step or two.
——The dust in the sarcophagus of the conqueror differs not from the dust in the peasant’s grave. And all that sweat and pain and blood for a few years of vainglorious adventure.
——The mere denial of ambition is not virtue. Virtue lies in the proper direction of ambition, not in its suppression.
AMERICA: Was erected with material that the builders had rejected: adventurers, refugees, criminals, bonded persons, slaves, the hunted and the outcasts. Its glory is the nimbus that forever hazes about the down-trodden.
——America has freed the world and the world cannot forgive her for that.
AMUSEMENT: Is the keyhole through which you can watch man unobserved.
ANCESTOR WORSHIP: May not only lead youth to search amid their heritage for the lasting values, but may tend to make older people prove their virtues by today’s deeds.
ANCESTORS: I wish it were possible to have one of our ancient ancestors, let’s say from three thousand years ago, pay us a visit. Many of us would realize how little we have learned since in things that matter.
ANCESTRY: Is something we all have, but an odd few insist upon it as their very own.
ANGELS: May be a figment of imagination, but devils are for real; I have met too many of them to doubt it.
——Angels are in the heavens, I am sure, because there are deeds done by mortals that are difficult to explain by the mortal nature of man. The angels of self-sacrifice and everlasting devotion, of courage and tenderness—they must be fluttering about in the winds high above, sometimes taking on the face of man and his flesh.
——Why did the Lord make so few winged ones and so many that crawl?
——I don’t know if the angels have wings; I am sure the devils do, they move about so fast.
——If God could make angels, why did He bother with men?
ANGER: Who never feels anger never cares.
——Anger is the big brother of compassion.
ANIMAL: A tiger may be ferocious but only man carries grudges from kin to kid.
——Man has succeeded in cowing almost every beast except his fellow man.
——Animals have no conscience. If they did, they would be better than people.
——Animals we all are, but they live for today, we for tomorrow.
ANTHROPOMORPHISM: The Bible suffers from theological anthropomorphism and the Darwinian theorems from a scientific one.
ANTICIPATION: Nothing really ever happens; anticipation is its own reward.
ANTIQUITY: They talk down its glory to flatter their own drabness.
APOLOGY: People will apologize for stepping on each other’s toes, but not for crushing each other’s hearts.
APPAREL: The drab tunic of the proletarian dictators is no less offensive a mockery of good taste than the gaudy uniforms of the sheiks of Araby.
APPARITIONS: Frighten us no more. No ghosts can match the horrible deeds of those this side the grave.
APPETITE: At the table of life some few forget in their hasty grab for wealth that shrouds have no pockets.
APPLAUSE: Plays the Siren on the ocean of life, sweet lips and subtle poison. Alexander, Attila, Hitler, Stalin—each sacrificed a generation on the altar of vanity.
——Some can handle it and are stimulated—others just get drunk.
APPROVAL: By a fool is worse than rejection by a sage.
ARGUMENT: Those who are dead-set to win are likely to mark their cards.
——A knave can win over a sage, if a fool is the referee.
——The philosophical mind never wishes to win an argument, but rather the truth.
——Argument is a sure sign of conversation gone sour.
——Some argue to prove a point, others to prove themselves.
ARISTOCRACY: Leaning on ancestors proves most often that aristocracy hardly ever outlasts its first generations.
——A horse does not become a thoroughbred by chewing its oats without snorting, nor a man by genteel handling of knife and fork.
——What was good in aristocracies is long disappeared and what is left is good for nothing.
——There are no old families. Some got at the moneybag sooner, that’s all.
——Those whose nobility is of their own making are the only true aristocrats.
——Throughout European history the people were kept in such filth, disease and poverty that their oppressors sincerely felt themselves better because they did not smell or work. The grand delusion of the parasitic blue blood.
——The freedom of the people begins with the end of dynasticism, and it is time to remove the remaining, almost ludicrous vestiges of dynastic tradition, with their pretentious titles of Baron, Earl, Lord, Duke and Marquis, if for no other reason than for that of historic tidiness. That place for this theatrical humbug is not on the mantelpiece but on the trash heap. The farce of today’s aristocracy is an ugly reminder of the days when the kings and their nobles grew rich and corpulent upon the sweat and the blood of the man of the street and the man behind the plow.
ARROGANCE: Will create, in the strong, distaste; in the weaklings, admiration. What a weak era we live in.
——A race-horse strut ill becomes a donkey.
ART: Is man’s feeble effort to imitate the Lord. Looking at certain canvases, I wonder if the Master is flattered.
——Dilettantes interpret art for art’s sake as art for the artist’s sake.
——Art for art’s sake is like cake for cake’s sake. It has to please someone or it is just a ragout of ingredients.
——Genius may be novel but novelties are not genius.
——Art in its original meaning means ability, craftsmanship, such as the art of the physician, the art of the soldier, the art of the architect. Our century has given birth to an art that requires no ability, no talent, merely expression. Some aging juvenile drips paint on a canvas on the floor, or uses his brush as a dart, and that bit of suffering canvas hits a frame and a remarkable public.
——Of late, even two beer cans on a wooden tray have been classified as sculpture if offered by the bearded ones. All these abstractionists have in common with painters and sculptors is a dirty smock.
——The scope and purpose of art is pleasure; all these aesthetic dissertations are no better than that particular lady’s talking away in the face of a beautiful sunrise.
ASSOCIATION: Does not prove guilt but it indicates affinity.
ASTRONOMY: Is only the knowledge of the visible firmament. A new science is yet to come: the search for the worlds beyond our garland of galaxies.
ATHEISM: I hope for God’s sake that He has not left Himself with man alone but has in other spheres better sons.
——God does not shun reason but evades the smart-aleck.
——To be of no God and rely on clever opinions is like having many acquaintances and no friend.
ATHEISTS: Are like the savage on an island who tells his family there is nothing beyond this rock but water and wind. One can live like that and die like that. But some of us have a hunch there is more to it than meets the eye and ear.
——Atheists brag that they can get along without God; this is hardly a distinction in an era where very, very few pay the Lord more than a Sunday call.
——Those who are not troubled by questions know all the answers.
——Atheists are often enough shamefaced antitheists. They wish no Theos, no God, no Principle to interfere with the petty advantages of their little existence.
——They can’t find God because they search for Him only in the narrow confines of their own traditions.
——The atheist steps on the hem of God and thinks he has stopped the heavens.
ATTITUDE: To a goat the most delicate garden is just a grazing place.
AUTHOR: It is imagination that makes a writer, not schooling, and you can’t teach the first.
——Writing is a peculiar art. In dance, music design, architecture, sculpture, very few feel competent enough to step before the public. In writing almost everyone wants to get into the act. The pen is patient and the paper indifferent. So much goes into print, and by so many who are totally unable to write, yet who lack the resolve to put down the pen.
AUTHORITY: Must indeed rest on the majority, but on their reason, not their prejudice.
AUTHORSHIP: Too many speak who should be listening; too many write who should be reading.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY: May be history, if offered forthright: Biography is mostly fiction, be it glib or ardent.
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BAAL: To understand the Baal of today you have to study the Baal of yesterday. How far away is Octavianus Augustus from Joseph Stalin? How far away is Ferdinand of Spain from Hitler? And still they are the same.
——They beat their brothers to the ground and set their foot upon their necks and put them to servitude like cattle. There will come a time when all symbols of oppression will roll into the sand—crown and scepter and hammer and sickle as well.
BABES: The Bible says you get the truth from them. Perhaps—if you get to them before they learn the ways of man.
BABY: When you first see it newborn it already has a life behind it of three-quarters of a year. It has suffered thirst and hunger, heat and cold, sour, bitter and sweet, tiredness, discomfort, indigestion and perhaps toxic illness. Sometimes it even completes its life span without ever setting foot into our world of rock and ether.
BEAST: Perhaps there are worlds where the insects are as large as our mammals and the mammals as small as our insects. Man’s greatest enemy would still be his fellow man and not the wild beast.
BEAUTY: Needs no explanation.
——Beauty travels on many levels. There is beauty seen by the heart, one seen by the mind, and one by the guts and sex glands. A steak can be beautiful and so can an architectural plan. I have even heard a physician exclaim: “What a beautiful eczema!”
BEGGARS: Are not the poor but the greedy.
BELIEF: Is measured by demonstration, not mere acceptance. Angels without wings are not in good faith.
BENEVOLENCE: Is the true ambrosia of the gods.
BIBLE: It is an odd book—the word of God, rituals of priests, legends, dull chronicles, and a sprinkling of childish lore—still, this poorly edited anthology has outlasted all the master epics. A book is just a bit of literature but the Bible is the very vessel of Shechinah, the spirit of man, between heaven and earth.
——It is an unfinished book. Who dares to say that Israel has yielded its last prophet?
——If the Book is not worth living by, it is not worth pretending by.
——Let God speak through the Book and bid the priests be silent.
——If the good Lord did not write the text, then King Solomon did, with some help from his father, David.
BIG MEN: Have the same problems as little ones, but on a greater scale.
BIOGRAPHIES: Are rarely worth reading. They are written by either flatterers or antagonists. At best they only give you the neighbors’ opinion of the hero, or some imagined composite put together with clippings and transcripts. We often don’t know what really motivates the soul of our nearest kin or acquaintance. Who dares to state with any degree of certainty what moved a man a century ago, a thousand miles away?
The biographer is like the man who longs to see the legendary lady in the castle window. She raises the blinds only when she is ready for you, all made up and dressed up and smiled up. From afar you can scarcely tell whether she is 17 or 70, and when you take a second look the blinds come down.
BIRTH CONTROL: The churches have given up sundry of their medieval aspirations, such as the curtailment of science and freedom of speech, but tenaciously they hold on to others, like the dissolution of marriages that have long ceased to have reality except on their ceremonial scrolls, or the salvation of the unwanted human race.
It is no longer necessary to kill an embryo in order to interfere with the destructive population explosion.
The beggarly sharecropper in Brazil, the poorly employed laborer in the metropolis of the Western world, the communal worker in the Far East, the idle in India—they keep on raising a crop of children that goes to seed in the weeds of their ill-attended lives.
Hundreds of thousands of embryos are clumsily aborted every year, bringing illness and death to desperate women of the disinherited classes. The wealthy can find a safer way; the poor are left to their primitive attempts.
The churches demand the continence of the poor while such is obviously unnatural, or the punishment of another family increase that is economically disastrous.
The sharecropper or day laborer who can barely feed four is compelled to half-starve eight or ten, and more.
The clerics, their heads in grossly misunderstood parchment, take it upon themselves to set the economy of a billion families in distress.
I do not know when God died and left bishops as His executors to interpret His Will and Testament.
I have yet to see His seal and signature on such documents as the bishops pretend to act upon.
I did, however, see His sign, undeniably so, in the laughing eyes of planned-for and well-cared-for infants.
I cannot imagine the good Lord delighting in a hundred million unwanted new-borns, their little bodies bloated from starvation, disease and lack of care.
I say, let the bishops go back to their parchments and let the world have only wanted children, wanted by their parents and thus wanted by the One whose countenance loves to shine upon a happy flock.
——Some of God’s self-appointed advocates take it upon themselves to wittingly discourage the scientific management of family increase. Quoting ill-interpreted passages from holy writ, the custodianship of which they pretend, they discourage by threat of damnation all sensible efforts on behalf of birth control.
I have rather doubted the authenticity of divine power over fertility which these graduates of theological seminaries allocate to themselves. But I am convinced that the good Lord would much prefer a small number of well-fed and well-clothed believers to uncontrolled masses of impoverished and starving multitudes.
BLASPHEMY: It is not the blasphemer God minds so much as the “protector” of His honor.
BLESSING: I doubt if prayers can sway the Lord, but if love can move mountains it can touch the heavens.
BLIND: Love may be blind, but hate sees what is not there.
BODY CHEMISTRY: Its influence upon mental structure is sharply emphasized in the sudden change of attitude in man and woman right after the culmination of the sexual act.
BOOK REVIEWING: Is a profession in which those who flunk the course get to teach the class.
BOOKS: Are like people: one man’s revelation is to the other a meaningless bore.
——Books are like people; it is not the number that matters, but the few that stand by.
——Our libraries are getting bigger, which makes it more difficult to find a good book. The shelves are groaning under the pressure of clothbound nothingness.
——A book is great by what you give to it, not take from it.
——The truly great book does not find its readers, it creates them.
——You may never find a friend, but you can always find a book. And with books as your friends, you will not go through life a lonely man.
——Big books are like overgrown people—fine to stare at but little else.
Books are the invisible tie between the people of the world. The Torah binds the Jews as the Koran the Moslems and the Gospels the Christian nations. Confucius bound the Chinese and so did Lao-tse and Buddha; until such books were replaced by Marx’s Capital.
The gods live in the books and where the books disappeared, the gods went with them. Gone are the Carthaginians, the Sumerians, and all their minor deities that never had a book of their own.
Books are all we have of the gods of the past, and of the present as well. And so the Book remains with us the ever-heritage of the tie with the heavens. Take away the books and you have a turmoil of people without unity or direction.
——Books are so long because the writers sell the harvest before they separate the wheat from the chaff.
——Perhaps the books of meaning shall be bound in the scroll of antiquity to warn the reader they have been penned to touch the soul and not tickle the funnybone.
——The influential book is not the one that reaches the surface of the many, but the heart of a few.
——Don’t live by a book; the purpose of man is man.
——What is disturbing in this contemporary phase of Western literature is not the existence of literary roaches; they have always been around, but they kept to their cracks. Now they come out into the open and want us to watch them on stage, in the recital hall and in the pages of what, amazingly, so many of our reviewers refer to as books.
BORE: No man is boring who speaks of what troubles him.
BOREDOM: In the land of the dullards, boredom is hardly noticed; it has never been really absent.
BORROWING: The lender may lose a friend but the indifferent will never have one.
BRAINPOWER: Only a fraction of mankind’s mental capacity is being used. The overwhelming bulk of the world’s brainpower perishes unused because of totalitarian executions or war activities, because of a poverty-stunted literacy among seven-tenths of the population, and finally because of premature assignment to dulling labor. We are running the world on one cylinder instead of ten.
BRAVERY: Fear alone makes for bravery; the reckless show no virtue, only contempt.
BRIBERY: Let not the satiated judge the pressure of temptation suffered by the hungry.
BROTHERHOOD: Who is not his brother’s keeper belongs not to the family of man.
——Be wary of the protagonist for the brotherhood of mankind; likely as not, he pleads for love in terms of abstract billions of unknown foreigners because he never learned to love a small handful of his own people.
BUDDHISM: In its essence rests on four great principles, those of kindness, pity, communal joy and equanimity. Unlike Christendom, it managed to gain and retain loyal adherents without benefit of rack and fagot.
C
CABBALAH: The secret book of Hebrew tradition had no single author, nor had Torah or Talmud. Its many authors wrote with sagacity which was not theirs but rather the reflection of the Divine Intellect they venerated.
——The Cabbalah teaches that in the realm of cognition and inner being there are ten different spheres. Not even all those who speak for truth see it on the same level.
CALMNESS: Let not the calm of indifference be mistaken for a mastered temper!
CANDOR: Some who wouldn’t suffer a breeze delight in sending forth a tempest.
Candor is insolence in a Sunday suit.
CAPITALISM: Has the rich and the poor; Communism, the poor and the poorer.
——I would rather take capitalism without a soul than Communism without a heart.
CARE: Who does not care has no care.
CATHEDRAL: The most imposing cathedrals are never too far from slums.
CAUSALITY: There are two causes of every effect; the visible one, and the real one.
CAUSE: It is a Cause that separates men from the mere mass.
CELIBACY: Is not a virtue and eunuchs are not paragons of ethics.
CEREMONY: Is the outward sign of an inward duty. Some who deride ceremonials are merely covering up the tracks of their own egotism.
CHABAD: To understand the forces of the world is not enough. To gain access to the creative powers, the Cabbalah teaches, one must have wisdom and intuition (chochma and bina). Only the three combined—chochma, bina, da-at (chabad)—raise man above the material world.
CHANCE: Throws people together, man and woman, friend and foe. Chance makes kin and kings, a turned-up nose or a dusky skin, and places one’s cradle in a mansion or a tent in the desert. From this unsorted mixture in the caldron of fate man draws his lot, his life and his luck. Yet some still like to think their dish was set out for them with deliberate intent by a providential hand.
CHANGE: Friends, work, leisure, convictions—man moves in a circle. Happy the man who can when need be jump his track for a wider orbit.
——You may change man’s conduct but not his conscience.
——No man is the same for more than a fortnight.
CHARACTER: Is hard to determine, there are so many layers of pretense and prejudice hiding the core. Scratch the surface and you’ll find the good are not so good, the bad not so bad.
——Character gets no better with age, only more pronounced.
——Character shows its color by our sins, not our virtues. The latter are too bland and lilylike.
——Suffering may not make character, but kindness will.
——Character must be seen in everyday life, not just in its Sunday best.
——Tell me what you read and I’ll tell you what you are.
——It is when a man is in power that he shows his true direction and the measure of his patience.
——Mankind suffers from those sick in character, not sick in mind. Our mental healers tend the foibles of elderly ladies and frustrated men.
What ails our generation are the viciously detached, despotic and clever schemers who are driving the world from brink to brink.
CHARITY: Is not the effect of faith, it is faith.
——Charity is the common denominator of all religions.
——There is no charity so noble the cynic cannot impugn its motivation.
CHASTITY: Is honorable but charity is virtue come alive.
CHEERFULNESS: May be only mood, but one for the better.
CHILDHOOD: The premature fruit may be much inferior to the slowly ripening.
CHILDREN: Emulate the prejudices and superstitions of their parents, rarely their wisdom.
——The newborn starts off with a score of notches on which to hang the good things in life. Watch the community load him with prejudice, malice and superstition.
——The wondrous adventures a child’s mind can experience on a walk through a deserted, littered lot set between two old houses!
——Our ancestors called their newborn boy Kaddish, the Holy One. The child was their link to living eternity. Those who spend their existence without a child have no share in the fate of tomorrow’s world. They circle around themselves with their backs to the future generations.
——To a child, its games of make-believe are as serious as our realities are to us. I sometimes wonder which of the two has more substance.
——There are no children, only young people.
——No one would undertake to raise horses without a solid study of husbandry; still people feel competent to raise children without bothering at all to properly prepare themselves.
CHIVALRY: The chivalry of the medieval ages was no more than arrogant horsemen riding roughshod over the poor of the land, the land of the innocent neighbor as well as that of the native sons. If these cavaliers went abroad with their artful weapons, hammered out of the poll taxes they took from the meager earnings of the serfs and laborers, they didn’t go to serve the cause of goodness or justice or peace, but rather the irrepressible wish of their liege or their own for loot of land or loot of gold.
——It may be that some of the epics and legendary tales involving the era of chivalry rate fair or even high as pieces of literature. But is the tune worthy of such a high price? Must truth and sheer humaneness be sacrificed as the price for these false, adulterated songs of romanticized glorification of kingly scoundrels and robber cavaliers?
CHOICE: At so many crossroads it’s not a choice between good and bad, but between evil and greater evil.
CHOSEN PEOPLE: The pagans and gentiles begrudge the Jews their claim to a heritage which they themselves have been rejecting for thousands of years.
——The Jews chose God when no one else wanted Him.
——The Lord is not selective; the people are.
CHRIST: The greatest number of books have been written about one whom we know the least: Jesus Christ.
——One cannot be a Christian while living the life of a pagan. If your heart is pagan and your deeds are pagan, you remain outside the Circle of Christ, which means Church of Christ, no matter what prayers your lips speak, nor what the ikon before which you kneel.
Echod