Jack Goldman > Jack's Quotes

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.”
― Jerry Garcia

“If we had any nerve at all, if we had any real balls as a society, or whatever you need, whatever quality you need, real character, we would make an effort to really address the wrongs in this society, righteously.”
― Jerry Garcia

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
― Maimonides

“An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.”
― Martin Buber

“If not now, when?”
― Rabbi Hillel

“If I am not for myself, who is for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?”
― Rabbi Hillel

“The greatest adventure is what lies ahead. Today and tomorrow are yet to be said. The chances, the changes are all yours to make. The mold of your life is in your hands to break.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“Oh, I thought everybody knew you jerked off punks underneath the Queensboro Bridge for fifteen dollars a man.” “Don’t say that anymore.” “Okay, sorry. I didn’t know you told me in confidence.” “Don’t you remember I was crying when I told you?”
― Norm Macdonald, Based on a True Story

“Such a long long time to be gone
and a short time to be there”
― Robert Hunter

“Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god. ”
― Aristotle, Politics

“They who love in excess also hate in excess.”
― Aristotle, Politics

“and poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.”
― Aristotle, Politics

“Anticipate charity by preventing poverty.”
― Moses Maimonides

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
― Plato

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“A moth goes into a podiatrist’s office, and the podiatrist’s office says, “What seems to be the problem, moth?”

The moth says “What’s the problem? Where do I begin, man? I go to work for Gregory Illinivich, and all day long I work. Honestly doc, I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore. I don’t even know if Gregory Illinivich knows. He only knows that he has power over me, and that seems to bring him happiness. But I don’t know, I wake up in a malaise, and I walk here and there… at night I…I sometimes wake up and I turn to some old lady in my bed that’s on my arm. A lady that I once loved, doc. I don’t know where to turn to. My youngest, Alexendria, she fell in the…in the cold of last year. The cold took her down, as it did many of us. And my other boy, and this is the hardest pill to swallow, doc. My other boy, Gregarro Ivinalititavitch… I no longer love him. As much as it pains me to say, when I look in his eyes, all I see is the same cowardice that I… that I catch when I take a glimpse of my own face in the mirror. If only I wasn’t such a coward, then perhaps…perhaps I could bring myself to reach over to that cocked and loaded gun that lays on the bedside behind me and end this hellish facade once and for all…Doc, sometimes I feel like a spider, even though I’m a moth, just barely hanging on to my web with an everlasting fire underneath me. I’m not feeling good. And so the doctor says, “Moth, man, you’re troubled. But you should be seeing a psychiatrist. Why on earth did you come here?”

And the moth says, “‘Cause the light was on.”
― Norm Macdonald

“Standing on the water casting your bread
While the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing
Distant ships sailing into the mist
You were born with a snake in both of your fists
While a hurricane was blowing
Freedom just around the corner for you
But with truth so far off, what good will it do?”
― Bob Dylan

“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”
― Bertrand Russell

“He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.”
― Emmanuel Kant

“I have on my table a violin string. It is free to move in any direction I like. If I twist one end, it responds; it is free.
But it is not free to sing. So I take it and fix it into my violin. I bind it and when it is bound, it is free for the first time to sing.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

“What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.”
― Aristotle

“Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”
― Hannah Arendt

“There is one good thing about Marx: he was not a Keynesian”
― Murray N Rothbard

“I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace.”
― Baruch Spinoza

“The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.”
― Baruch Spinoza

“Accept the truth from whatever source it comes.”
― Moses Maimonides