Leo Rosten Quotes

Jews participated in the ownership of human beings right up through to the nineteenth century, and biblical texts were quoted by some Civil War–era American rabbis to justify the South’s “peculiar institution.

It has been said that the basic principle of Jewish ethics lies in the idea of mandatory mitzvas. Said Eleazar ben Simeon: “The world is judged by the majority of its people [and] an individual by the majority of his deeds. Happy is he who performs a good deed: that may tip the scale for him and the world [italics mine].” Israel Zangwill called the mitzvas the Jews’ “sacred sociology.

The great rabbis did not “create” Halakha: what the rabbis did was to codify and clarify the legal teachings, adapting them to changing social conditions. “The Rabbinic Halakha,” writes Judah Goldin, “protected legislation from inflexibility and society from fundamentalism

I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong.

The purpose of life is not to be happy at all. It is to be useful, to be honorable. It is to be compassionate. It is to matter, to have it make some difference that you lived.

The purpose of life is not to be happy — but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you lived at all.

when the overwhelming majority of Europeans were illiterate, it would have been hard to find a Jewish male over the age of five who could not read. Virtually every Jewish boy had to learn Hebrew.

A young khokhem told his grandmother that he was going to become a doctor of philosophy. The bubbe smiled proudly: “Wonderful. But what kind of disease is ‘philosophy’?

​It is the weak who are cruel. Gentleness can only be expected from the strong.

Virtually all of male Jewry participated in a perpetual seminar on the Torah and the Talmud. Even the cobblers. Even the tailors. The drovers and diggers, farmhands and carpenters. The peddlers and beggars and shopkeepers.

On his first day in cheder, the boy’s mother and father would stand over him as the teacher pointed to the letters of the alef-bet (alphabet). The lad repeated the names of the Hebrew letters: alef … beyt … giml … daled … And for each name, his mother would give him a little honey cake or cookie, shaped in the form of that letter, or would put honey into his mouth, to eat with the cake — to show how sweet learning is.

Chutzpa is that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.

He sat there, sighing and moaning and ruminating thusly: “Oh, if only the Holy One, blessed be His name, would give me ten thousand dollars, I promise I would give a thousand to the poor. Halevay! … And if the Holy One doesn’t trust me, He can deduct the thousand in advance and just give me the balance.

I wouldn’t say ‘Hello’ to a paskudnyak like that!” “Did you ever hear of such a paskudnyak?” “That whole family is a collection of paskudnyaks.” This word is one of the most greasily graphic, I think, in Yiddish. It offers the connoisseur three nice, long syllables, starting with a sibilant of reprehension and ending with a nasality of scorn. It adds cadence to contempt.

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you just can't help it.