“For the Arabs, and the above all for the 1.2 million Arabs of Palestine, the partitioning of the land in which they had been a majority for seven centuries seemed a monstrous injustice thrust upon them by white Western imperialism in expiation of a crime they had not committed. With few exceptions, the Jewish people had dwelt in relative security among the Arabs over the centuries. The golden age of the Diaspora had come in the Spain of the caliphs, and the Ottoman Turks had welcomed the Jews when the doors of much of Europe were closed to them. The ghastly chain of crimes perpetrated on the Jewish people culminating in the crematoriums of Germany had been inflicted on them by the Christian nations of Europe, not those of the Islamic East, and it was on those nations, not theirs, the Arabs maintained, that the burden of those sins should fall. Beyond that, seven hundred years of continuous occupation seemed to the Arabs a far more valid claim to the land than the Jews' historic ties, however deep.”
― Larry Collins, quote from O Jerusalem
“In Jerusalem, as elsewhere in Palestine, the Haganah's basic strategy reflected a philosophy propounded by David Ben-Gurion. What the Jews had, they must hold. No Jew was to leave his home, his farm, his kibbutz, his office without permission. Every outpost, every settlement, every village, no matter how isolated, was to be clung to as though it were Tel Aviv itself.”
― Larry Collins, quote from O Jerusalem
“our investigation led us to discover was that at the peak of the battle the Jewish soldiers owed their success less to their courage than to the sudden arrival of a most unusual ally: a swarm of bees, infuriated by the smell of gunpowder, descended on the helpless Arab legionnaires and forced them to abandon their dominating position above the monastery.”
― Larry Collins, quote from O Jerusalem
“Heirs to the philosophy of a Zionist zealot named Vladimir Jabotinsky, they clung to the dream of a Jewish state running from Acre to Amman, from Mount Hermon to the Suez Canal. For them, Churchill's decision to create the emirate of Transjordan with a stroke of his pen on a Sunday afternoon in Cairo had been a mutilation of the Balfour Declaration. They wanted it all, all the land that had once belonged to the Biblical kingdom of Israel, and they wanted it, if possible, without the encumbering presence of its Arab inhabitants.”
― Larry Collins, quote from O Jerusalem
“Their excesses were largely responsible for the anti-Jewish sentiment which permeated the British forces in Palestine. Those excesses had produced other fruits, however. They had helped disgust the British public with Britain's role in Palestine, and thus played an important role in leading Clement Attlee to his decision to leave.”
― Larry Collins, quote from O Jerusalem
“Arab-Jewish relations in the Old City had always been good. Most of the property in the quarter was Arab-owned, and one of its familiar sights was the Arab rent collector making his way from house to house, pausing in each for the rent and a ritual cup of coffee. Here the Islamic respect for men of religion had been naturally extended to the quarter's scholars in their yeshivas. As for the quarter's poor artisans and shopkeepers, the most natural of bonds, poverty, tied them to their Arab neighbors.”
― Larry Collins, quote from O Jerusalem
“This looks like a job for inadvisably applied magic if ever I saw one.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Making Money
“For the more a man limits himself, the nearer he is on the other hand to what is limitless; it is precisely those who are apparently aloof from the world who build for themselves a remarkable and thoroughly individual world in miniature, using their own special equipment, termit-like.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Chess Story
“He tasted like midnight and wind, and shades of rich brown and light blue. Colors that made her feel safe and guarded.”
― Stephanie Garber, quote from Caraval
“She had to make her own marvelous mistakes.”
― Paul Scott, quote from The Jewel in the Crown
“The most futile thing a man can do is to ponder the alternatives, to stew and fret over the life that might have been lived if circumstances had not pointed his future in a certain direction.”
― William Styron, quote from The Confessions of Nat Turner
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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