Like Rousseau, he loved humanity in general but was often cruel to human beings in particular. - Paul Johnson

This culture-contempt on the Greek side, and the love-hate which some educated Jews had for Greek culture, were sources of constant tension.

Jesus was a learned Jew who said that learning was not necessary, who took the spirit and not the letter as the essence of the Law and who thus embraced the unlearned, the ignorant, the despised, the am ha-arez, made them indeed his special constituency.

Twain had it too and Alexander Woollcott. Stephen Spender and Barbara Skelton insisted Cyril Connolly had it, on rare occasions, when the word for it was “magnificent,” but I only heard faint echoes of this gigantic gift. Sir Isaiah Berlin had it, and I heard him: but the trouble was, once he got really going on a line of fantastic humor, he began to speak so fast, and his accent became so impenetrable, that the sense wasdifficult to grasp, though his evident delight in his fun was so furious that you laughed all the same.