Amos Elon Quotes
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Democracies are notorious for a tendency to obey the feelings rather than the mind; thus the nature of democracies often makes it difficult to conclude a peace after a hard-won war. Generous victors are rare.
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The brief legal emancipation of Jews during the Napoleonic wars released unparalleled economic, professional, and cultural energies. It was though a high dam had suddenly been breached.
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They are mostly Americans and almost all are Protestant. Many have a strong grounding in the Bible. In Jerusalem, they suddenly take off their clothes or shout prophecies on street corners, only to revert to normal after a few days' treatment.
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He should have added the old truism that in war millions of young men butcher millions of other young men who have done them no harm and whom they have never met—all on behalf of a few old men who know one another only too well.
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In Jerusalem, the various modes of worship essentially stood for the same cause but were equally hateful to one another. They never served as a unifying factor. Their adherents were equally manipulated by the clergies to regard the others as wicked infidels or idolaters. The centuries passed in constant pious agitation and in frequent religious wars.
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Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet-and this is its horror!-it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it find nothing there. That is the banality of evil.
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Jerusalem has been - and for many, still is - a metaphor for destruction and the vengeance of an offended God. She is the city where believers have killed unbelievers to give life to faith.
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Hindsight is not necessarily the best guide to understanding what really happened. The past is often as distorted by hindsight as it is clarified by it.