Itzhak Peretz Quotes

[Christianity] is a denial of this world, a severance from reality, an abdication, a means of redemption from, not for, life.

Children... constitute man's eternity.

It is not only individuals—peoples too cannot live merely for themselves. The whole world must be redeemed.

[About Jews] Sheer egotism compels us to the purest love of mankind as a whole.... Our hearts are like a sponge, receptive to all the newest humanitarian ideas; and our sympathy goes out to all the unfortunate, all the oppressed.

You are the weakest and the least, and the last to be redeemed.... You will be freed, when man will rise above the earthly, when human worms will turn into human eagles.

Who tells the truth needs no fancy phrases.

I fear you. As victors, you may become the bureaucracy: doling out to each his bit as in a poorhouse, assigning to each his task as in a prison. And you will exterminate the creator of new worlds,—the free human will, and stop up the purest well of human happiness—the power of the one to face thousands, to stand up to peoples and generations.

Purim is the birthday of the first Schutz-Jude, the first Jewish toady to foreign royalty.

I am a rainworm, buried deep
Among the oozing, slimy things,
Yet of an eagle's nest I dream,
And eagle's wings.

A stranger's rose is but a thorn.

A heap of bricks is not yet a house.

Man has been likened to an earthen pot.... You have but to tap the pot with your finger. If it rings back full and true, all is well; there is your perfect pot. And if not—man, alas, has been likened to a broken potsherd.

In the second and third exiles we have served as a living protest against greed and hate, against physical force, against "might makes right"!

I want to soar the boundless blue
Where winds and tempests have their birth,
And let the clouds conceal for me
Not heaven, but the earth.

At the Throne of Glory it is not the nobly-born that are beloved, but the nobly-risen.