“On May 9, 1916, the British and French entered into a clandestine treaty on how they intended to carve up the region. The treaty was the Sykes-Picot, named for the negotiators. Always described as infamous, the treaty ignored both Jewish aspirations and Sharif Husain’s personal ambitions. And so Palestine became the ‘twice promised land.”
― Leon Uris, quote from The Haj
“Nonsense. Islam is unable to live at peace with anyone. We Arabs are the worst. We can’t live with the world, and even more terrible, we can’t live with each other. In the end it will not be Arab against Jews but Arab against Arab. One day our oil will be gone, along with our ability to blackmail. We have contributed nothing to human betterment in centuries, unless you consider the assassin and the terrorist as human gifts. The world will tell us to go to hell. We, who tried to humiliate the Jews, will find ourselves humiliated as the scum of the earth. Oh, put down that silly potsherd and let us have some coffee.”
― Leon Uris, quote from The Haj
“So before I was nine I had learned the basic canon of Arab life. It was me against my brother; me and my brother against our father; my family against my cousins and the clan; the clan against the tribe; and the tribe against the world. And all of us against the infidel.”
― Leon Uris, quote from The Haj
“I never got over the horror of watching their graduation ceremonies, performed before their parents. After a demonstration of ‘military prowess’ and personal courage the ceremony ended with their biting off the heads of snakes. As the blood dripped down their chins, they roasted the dead animals for a victory feast. Other schools had the children strangle puppies and drink their blood.”
― Leon Uris, quote from The Haj
“We once again man the barricades -- alone. Berated by our smug, so-called allies, of the Western Democracies. Islam is going to turn this world inside out before this century is out and you'd better have enough guts to deal with it.”
― Leon Uris, quote from The Haj
“Perhaps the bazaar looks disorganized to you, but it works for us. Perhaps Islam looks fanatical to you, but it provides us with the means to survive the harshness of this life and prepare us for a better life hereafter.”
― Leon Uris, quote from The Haj
Leon Uris
Born place: in Baltimore, Maryland, The United States
Born date August 3, 1924
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“Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized," Bennett said in a speech at the start of the dust storms. What was happening, he said, was "sinister," a symptom of "our stupendous ignorance.”
― Timothy Egan, quote from The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
“That is one of the problems with getting older. There is a distinct lag time between how you see others and how you view yourself. I still thought of myself as looking twenty-four.”
― Emily Giffin, quote from Something Blue
“Language as putative science. -
The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world. The sculptor of language was not so modest as to believe that he was only giving things designations, he conceived rather that with words he was expressing supreame knowledge of things; language is, in fact, the first stage of occupation with science. Here, too, it is the belief that the truth has been found out of which the mightiest sources of energy have flowed. A great deal later - only now - it dawns on men that in their belief in language they have propagated a tremendous error. Happily, it is too late for the evolution of reason, which depends on this belief, to be put back. - Logic too depends on presuppositions with which nothing in the real world corresponds, for example on the presupposition that there are identical things, that the same thing is identical at different points of time: but this science came into existence through the opposite belief (that such conditions do obtain in the real world). It is the same with mathematics, which would certainly not have come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no real circle, no absolute magnitude.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Human, All Too Human
“The loss of innocence refers to carnal sin and it's not like you have to do the deed to experience the pleasure of sin. Correct?!..
Cayman dipped his chin.
'In other words, all she needed to do was to have an orgasm..And most likely not by herself.'
..Someone kill me now!
..'Well.' Roth drew the word out.'This is awkward.'
I slowly lowered my hands.'You think?”
― Jennifer L. Armentrout, quote from Stone Cold Touch
“He thought of the next Saturday. [...] He thought of the picnic by the dipping pool on the river, where oaks and willows dappled the sun on water the color of tea; and girls in light summer dresses would sit in pools of pale cotton.
And he knew he would not go.”
― Stef Penney, quote from The Tenderness of Wolves
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