95 Quotes by Leo Rosten

I have it on indisputable authority that in Scarsdale, during a school celebration of Christmas, one of the children sang the carol as “God rest ye, Jerry Mandelbaum.

The great rabbis did not “create” Halakha: what the rabbis did was to codify and clarify the legal teachings, adapting them to changing social conditions. “The Rabbinic Halakha,” writes Judah Goldin, “protected legislation from inflexibility and society from fundamentalism.

I sometimes think there is a dimension beyond the four of experience and Einstein: insight, that fifth dimension which promises to liberate us from bondage to the long, imperfect past.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved.

If at first you don’t succeed, before you try again, stop to figure out what you did wrong.

Extremists think ‘communication’ means agreeing with them.

Machines certainly can solve problems, store information, correlate, and play games – but not with pleasure.

The purpose of life is not to be happy, the purpose of life is to matter...

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man’s magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.