Quotes to inspire and reflect

Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.

I, for one, know of no sweeter sight for a man’s eyes than his own country.

There is no sorrow above / The loss of a native land.

Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life.

Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but for a man of sluggish mind and bad manners there is decidedly no place like home.

Everybody’s always talking about people breaking into houses ... but there are more people in the world who want to break out of houses.

Every roof is agreeable to the eye, until it is lifted; then we find tragedy and moaning women, and hardeyed husbands.

Stay, stay at home, my heart, and rest; / Homekeeping hearts are happiest.

Where Thou art—that—is Home.

In love of home, the love of country has its rise.

In Hollywood, as I’ve often said, if you don’t sing or dance, you end up as an after-dinner speaker.

He’s got an option on the Six-Day War, for a musical. Yul Brynner is already as good as signed to star as Dayan.

Conditions in the [movie] industry somehow propose the paradox: “We brought you here for your individuality but while you’re here we insist that you do everything to conceal it."

It [Hollywood] is, for example, such a slack soft place—even its pleasure lacking the fierceness of Provence—that withdrawal is practically a condition of safety.

Labor Day symbolizes our determination to achieve an economic freedom for the average man which will give his political freedom reality.

I shall manage to eat somewhere and get full— even if at a restaurant—but, God knows, I am still young enough to have a horror of Christmas by myself.

Holidays / Have no pity

People can’t concentrate properly on blowing other / people to pieces properly if their minds are poisoned / by thoughts suitable to the twenty-fifth of De- / cember.

As soon as histories are properly told there is no more need of romances.

World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual.

History justifies whatever we want it to. It teaches absolutely nothing, for it contains eveiything and gives examples of everything.

Wherever men have lived there is a story to be told, and it depends chiefly on the story-teller or historian whether that is interesting or not.

It is impossible to write ancient history because we lack source materials, and impossible to write modern history because we have far too many.

The talent of historians lies in their creating a true ensemble out of facts which are but half-true.

We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

Every fact and every work exercises a fresh persuasion over every age and every new species of man. History always enunciates new truths.

The middle sort of historians, of which the most part are, they spoil all; they will chew our meat for us.

Historians relate not so much what is done as what they would have believed.

History is the action and reaction of these two, nature and thought—two boys pushing each other on the curbstone of the pavement.

The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.

The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?

The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public’opinion.

The historian must not try to know what is truth, if he values his honesty; for, if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify his facts.

Every hero is a Samson. The strong man succumbs to the intrigues of the weak and the many; and if in the end he loses all patience he crushes both them and himself.

History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough.

Better not be a hero than work oneself up into heroism by shouting lies.

A hero is a man who does what he can.

The epic disappeared along with the age of personal heroism; there can be no epic with artillery.

When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber, battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash.

No hero to me is the man who, by easy shedding of his blood, purchases fame: my hero is he who, without death, can win praise.

The chief business of the nation, as a nation, is the setting up of heroes, mainly bogus.

The heroic man does not pose; he leaves that for the man who wishes to be thought heroic.

We moderns do not believe in demigods, but our smallest hero we expect to feel and act as a demigod.

The hero is suffered to be himself.

A hero cannot be a hero unless in an heroic world.

A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.

The last act in the biography of the hero is that of the death or departure.