Israel Zangwill Quotes

The Past: Our cradle, not our prison; there is danger as well as appeal in its glamour. The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition.

The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition.

America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!

As soon as you tolerate something, it becomes bearable, and before long it will become common.

A man likes his wife to be just clever enough to appreciate his cleverness, and just stupid enough to admire it.

It takes two men to make one brother.

Take from me the hope that I can change the future and you will send me mad.

You should examine yourself daily. If you find faults, you should correct them. When you find none, you should try even harder.

You, the Spirit of the Settlement! ... Not understand that America is God's crucible, the great melting-pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! Here, you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries.

No, the real American has not yet arrived. He is only in the Crucible, I tell you - he will be the fusion of all races, perhaps the coming superman.

The Land of Israel needs a People and the People of Israel needs a Land.

The law of dislike for the unlike will always prevail. And whereas the unlike is normally situated at a safe distance, the Jews bring the unlike into the heart of every milieu, and must there defend a frontier line as large as the world.

There never was an age in which so many people were able to write badly.

You cannot be anything if you want to be everything. But if you are content to be something, you may by analogy be many things.

Selfishness is the only real atheism.

New York is the great stone desert.

Let us start a new religion with one commandment, "Enjoy thyself.

Everything changes but change

In the din and tumult of the age, the still small voice of Jerusalem remains our only music.

Artistic truth is for me literally the highest truth: art may seize the essence of persons and movements no less truly, and certainly far more vitally, than a scientific generalization unifies a chaos of phenomena. Time and Space are only the conditions through which spiritual facts struggle. Hence I have here and there permitted myself liberties with these categories.

The way Bernard Shaw believes in himself is very refreshing in these atheistic days when so many people believe in no God at all.

What clinical lectures I will give in heaven, demonstrating the ignorance of doctors!

Every dogma has its day, but ideals are eternal.

Until mankind heeds the message on the Hebrew trumpet blown, and the faith of the whole world's people is the faith that is our own.

The vulgar herd catches at the gross apparent fact, but the man of insight knows what lies on the surfaces does lie.