Leo Rosten Quotes

The Hebrew alphabet, incidentally, came from the inhabitants of Canaan, which was that part of Palestine the Greeks called Phoenicia. Hebrew was most probably the language spoken by the Phoenicians/Canaanites (Isaiah spoke of the “language of Canaan”), who almost surely created those letters that formed a Semitic alphabet and from which all the alphabets in Europe descended. Hebrew was one of a cluster of related languages (Aramaic, Ugaritic, Akkadian, Arabic, etc.) known as “Semitic.

PROVERB: “Man comes into the world with an oy! — and leaves with a gevalt!

Sholem Aleichem defined a shadkhn as “a dealer in livestock.

The famous Dubner maggid, a gaon, was asked by an admiring student: “How is it that you always have the perfect parable for the topic under discussion?” The gaon smiled. “I’ll answer with a parable.” And he told the following story: A lieutenant of the Tsar’s cavalry, riding through a small shtetl, drew his horse up in astonishment, for on the side of a barn he saw a hundred chalked circles — and in the center of each was a bullet hole! The lieutenant excitedly stopped the first passerby, crying, “Who is the astonishing marksman in this place? Look at all those bull’s-eyes!” The passerby sighed. “That’s Shepsel, the shoemaker’s son, who is a little peculiar.” “I don’t care what he is,” said the lieutenant. “Any man who can shoot that well — ” “Ah,” the pedestrian said, “you don’t understand. You see, first Shepsel shoots — then he draws the circle.” The gaon smiled. “That’s the way it is with me. I don’t search for a parable to fit the subject. I introduce the subject for which I have a perfect parable.

What a farshtinkener business!” has the edge on “What a stinking business” in my opinion, because the sh is more eloquent than the s in the communication of obloquious nuances. It is also more chic to enlist a foreign word when driven to coarse utterance.

A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they're dead.

The rabbi of Chelm visited the prison, and there he heard all but one of the inmates insist on their innocence. So he came back, held a council of wise men, and recommended that Chelm have two prisons: one for the guilty and another for the innocent.

The braggadocio aspect is important: a successful but modest man is ordinarily not called a k’nocker. A k’nocker is someone who works crossword puzzles — with a pen (especially if someone is watching).

"I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be "happy". I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be honorable, to be compassionate. It is, above all, to matter: to count, to stand for something, to have it make some difference that you lived at all."

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved.

Why do the wicked always form groups, whereas the righteous do not? Because the wicked, walking in darkness, need company, but the righteous, who live in the light, do not fear being alone.

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.

Waiter: “Tea or coffee, gentlemen?” First customer: “I’ll have tea.” Second customer: “Me too — and be sure the glass is clean!” (WAITER EXITS, RETURNS) Waiter: “Two teas. Which one asked for the clean glass?

Conservative: One who admires radicals a century after they're dead.

I have it on indisputable authority that in Scarsdale, during a school celebration of Christmas, one of the children sang the carol as “God rest ye, Jerry Mandelbaum.