Roger Cohen > Quotes

“Conspiracy theory is the ultimate refuge of the powerless. If you cannot change your own life, it must be that some greater force controls the world.”
― Roger Cohen

“Conspiracy theories are the refuge of the disempowered.”
― Roger Cohen

“Extreme suffering engenders revulsion. Bert felt what Saul Bellow would call the “sense of personal contamination and aversion” engendered by the “disintegrating bodies” of the survivors of the Nazi camps. He hated himself for it. He felt shame but could summon no sympathy. The humiliated Jew was a pathetic figure, his humanity shredded. As Joseph Roth observed, “No one loves victims, not even their fellow victims.” Israel arose to consign that figure to the past.”
― Roger Cohen, The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family

“Joseph Brodsky wrote: “If there is any substitute for love, it’s memory. To memorize, then, is to restore intimacy.” The restoration of intimacy is more than an act of love; it is an attempt, by writing down a lost world before it dissolves, to bring memory closer to truth. It”
― Roger Cohen, The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family

“In our case, as for countless other Jews, the price of integration was the loss of millennia of Jewish tradition. The Torah’s instruction gave way to the moral void of modernity, a hectic dance over absence. Many”
― Roger Cohen, The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family

“Part of the process of getting out, of uprooting, is to shed origins. In Rome, as elsewhere in my family, the past was less a source of fascination than a thing to be overcome.”
― Roger Cohen, The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family

“The liberators were not liberators. They were other occupiers. When”
― Roger Cohen, The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family

“inertia did not grip her. She hid her fragility as best she could. Children”
― Roger Cohen, The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family

“As Joseph Roth once wrote, “If there is one nation that is justified in seeing the ‘national question’ as essential to its survival, then surely it is the Jews who are forced to become a ‘nation’ by the nationalism of others.” Zionism”
― Roger Cohen, The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family

“is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
― Roger Cohen, The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family