"It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them."
-Mark Twain

"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation."
-Herman Melville

"Jake: Ma'am, would it make you feel any better if we told you that what we're asking Matthew to do is a holy thing? Elwood: You see, we're on a mission from G-d."
-The Blues Brothers

"You might know who we are, but we KNOW who you are, you understand?"
-Jimmy (Goodfellas)

"Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path a nd leave a trail."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for something you are not."
-André Gide

"Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."
-Einstein

"The entire purpose of our existence is to overcome our negative habits."
- Vilna Goan

"if we were forced to choose just one, there would be no way to deny that Judaism is the most important intellectual development in human history."
- David Gelernter

"Because of the movies I make, people get nervous, because they think of me as difficult and angry. I am difficult and angry, but they don't expect a sense of humor. And the only thing that gets me through is a sense of humor.....It's a very savage kind of humor, it comes out of a great deal of pain."
-Martin Scorsese

"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."
-Einstein

"If all anti-Semitism could be made, by magic, to disappear, the American Jew would still face a problem of survival. The disease of assimilation and alienation of Jewish youth from its heritage and people is often spoken about, but its full gravity and danger are not comprehended by most of us. We face the problem of young Jews by the hundreds whose lack of Jewish identity and pride and whose Jewish rootlessness combine to drive them into foreign fields and hostile ideologies....At the same time, in Israel, the ironic growth of a similar Jewish identity crisis has arisen to plague the state with young Jews who identify with the state but not the Jewish people and whose alienation from Jewish heritage and tradition has now been joined by weakening of ties with their fellow Jews in exile."
-Rabbi Meir Kahane

"Jewish survival and redemption are proof eternal and ultimate that the world is not governed by logic, by sanity or by man. It is controlled and decreed by G-d."
-Rabbi Meir Kahane

"Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you believe that you too can become great."
-Mark Twain

"The only real laughter comes from despair."
-Groucho Marx

"The Jew who makes his body bend to his will is a man who has no chains on his arms. The Jew who hears the cry of fellow Jews and casts off from himself the vanities and nonsense of money and sterile status ... and leaps into the waters of duty – this is a man who has come out of Egypt."
-Rabbi Meir Kahane

"Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous."
-Einstein

"If a Jew doesn't make Kiddush (to sanctify himself by maintaining a distinctly Jewish lifestyle), then the non-Jew will make Havdalah for him (by making the Jew realize he is truly different)."
- R' Chaim of Volozhin

"What is the Jew?...What kind of unique creature is this whom all the rulers of all the nations of the world have disgraced and crushed and expelled and destroyed; persecuted, burned and drowned, and who, despite their anger and their fury, continues to live and to flourish. What is this Jew whom they have never succeeded in enticing with all the enticements in the world, whose oppressors and persecutors only suggested that he deny (and disown) his religion and cast aside the faithfulness of his ancestors?! The Jew - is the symbol of eternity. ... He is the one who for so long had guarded the prophetic message and transmitted it to all mankind. A people such as this can never disappear. The Jew is eternal. He is the embodiment of eternity."
- Leo Tolstoy

"It is certain that the Jew, if he desired-or if they were driven to it, as the antisemites seem to wish-could now have the ascendancy, nay, literally the supremacy, over Europe; that they are not working or planning for that end is equally sure... The resourcefulness of the modern Jews, both in mind and soul, is extraordinary..."
-Nietzsche

"One of the great problems with Americans is that - being a decent people - they assume that everyone else is equally decent."
-Rabbi Meir Kahane

"It's discourging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit."
-Sir Noël Coward

"For so long as the Jew has even one ally, he will be convinced - in his smallness of mind - that his salvation came from that ally. It is only when he is alone - against all of his own efforts and frantic attempts - that he will, through no choice, be compelled to turn to G-d."
-Rabbi Meir Kahane

At the base of our Torah and our Jewish psyche lies an incessant urgency. Not just a sense that things are not the way they should be, but a relentless yearning that things should heal this very moment."
-the Lubavitcher Rebbe

"Even if you fail to conquer the darkness entirely, even if you are still rolling in the mud with the enemy -you can still find G-d in the struggle itself. After all, He is not only light. He is darkness as well."
-the Lubavitcher Rebbe

"It's my experience that folks who have no vices have generally very few virtues."
-Abe Lincoln (unsourced)

"Love has its place, as does hate. Peace has its place, as does war. Mercy has its place, as do cruelty and revenge....Never, ever deal with terrorists. Hunt them down and, more important, mercilessly punish those states and groups that fund, arm, support, or simply allow their territories to be used by the terrorists with impunity.....No trait is more justified than revenge in the right time and place."
-Rabbi Meir Kahane Zt'l