But we are all victims, Captain Bastable, just as in other ways we are all aggressors. At root we are victims to the comforting lies we tell ourselves, of our willingness to shift moral responsibility onto leaders, organized religion—onto a deity or a race, if all else fails. Onto God, onto politicians, onto creatures from other planets. It is always the same impulse, to refuse responsibility. If we do not take responsibility for our own actions, ultimately we perish.

You’re forgetting. A people who see themselves primarily as victims are doomed. And we’re not doomed, are we?

Time is in us and we are in time. It changes us and we change it.

We humans are, at bottom, carriers of the time, because we take it with us, we use it, sometimes we waste it and sometimes something remains, though everything is doomed to oblivion.

Through memory we travel against time, through forgetfulness we follow its course.

You can either be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure. It all depends on how you view your life.

For men, time is a river. We are trapped in its flow, hurtling from past to present, always in the same direction.

I suppose it’s the way we are, humans that we are. Always finding it easier to make ourselves the victim in someone else’s tragedy. Though it is true, too, that sometimes it's hard to know to whom the tragedy really belongs.

used to feel that I was a victim of the world I saw. When things would go wrong, I would blame the world or those in it for my misery and feel justified in my anger. Today, I know I am not a victim of the world I see, and therefore tend to take responsibility for whatever I perceive and for the emotions I experience.

If I am the sole and eternal victim, then I create around and within myself and raise my children to an inability to see anyone who is not me. If I and only I occupy the throne of the victim, then no stranger can occupy it. This blindness reaches proportions that distort reality. I am not talking only about right-wing Jewish settlers, professional blind men who never see the residents of the West Bank...If I am the sole and eternal victim, then of course I refuse to accept any information that is liable to ruin my self-image. My receptors simply do pick it up. I have no need of it; I already have a map, with one marker it only: I am a victim, and everyone is against me. I refuse to hear not only about the Arabs, but also about myself. I break the mirror. At the base of this attitude is a dangerous thing: it is as if all of Zionism, if the fact of our living in Israel, is dependent on our not knowing and not wanting to know. Those who hold this attitude do not see the Israeli who gets up in the morning, goes to work, pays taxes, waters plants, raises his children, and does reserve army duty. Rather, they see the eternal victim, alone in the world, who sits upright on his throne with his eyes closed, smothering all other peoples (especially Arabs), and is always, always right, right with the blind, cold righteousness of the victim above whose head flutters the banner, "Vengeance is mine!" How many of us, today, see ourselves in this picture?

why do we personify time? Is it because we’re afraid to admit that our lives are measured by an abstract force that neither knows nor cares about our entry into existence? Or our departure into death? Time is our mysterious master giving it a face and hands we attempt to transform it into our servant.

When there is real danger time disappears, doesn’t it? There is immediate action. But we do not see the danger of many of our problems and therefore we invent time as a means of overcoming them. Time is a deceiver as it doesn’t do a thing to help us bring about a change in ourselves. Time is a movement which man has divided into past, present and future, and as long as he divides it he will always be in conflict.

Our curse as humans is that we are trapped in time; our curse is that we are forced to interpret life as a series of events — a story — and when we can’t figure out what our particular story is, we feel lost somehow.

We are all flawed and creatures of our times. Is it fair to judge us by the unknown standards of the future?