First-rate people hire first-rate people; second-rate people hire third-rate people. - Leo Rosten

In the Jewish communities of Europe, learned but poor Jews were much, much more highly respected than rich but unlearned ones. Am horets meant “uneducated” or “uncultured” (just as “villain,” in English, originally designated a serf, and “boor,” a peasant);

People say: idle curiosity. The one thing that curiosity cannot be is idle.

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.