Sephardic Quotes & Sayings

We've got to move beyond the idea that the public and private sectors are at odds. Government has to lay the groundwork for private equity to productively invest in things like education. It's a partnership, not a battle. — Sebastian Pinera

I may have been dead for the past hundred and fifty years, Susannah, ... but that doesn't mean I don't know how people say good night. And generally, when people say good night, they keep their tongues to themselves. — Meg Cabot

The levelling of the European man is the great process which cannot be obstructed; it should even be accelerated. The necessity of cleaving gulfs, distance, order of rank, is therefore imperative - not the necessity of retarding this process. This homogenizing species requires justification as soon as it is attained: its justification is that it lies in serving a higher and sovereign race which stands upon the former and can raise itself this task only by doing this. Not merely a race of masters whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an overflow of energy for beauty, bravery, culture, and manners, even for the most abstract thought; a yea-saying race that may grant itself every great luxury - strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative, rich enough to have no need of economy or pedantry; beyond good and evil; a hothouse for rare and exceptional plants. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I loved doing all those costume dramas. I didn't think, 'Ooh I've got to avoid being typecast' - you can't ever be dictated to by what other people think. I just do things because I fancy the parts and the directors. — Helena Bonham Carter

I don't think I was ever particularly mean. I can certainly think of some idiotic exchanges I've had. I was accused of destroying pop music, like Wagner destroyed opera - a guy in Germany started ranting that at me. — Elvis Costello

It's still possible to be a cockeyed optimist these days - you just have to be a little more cockeyed. — Robert Breault

My response was that more than half of Israelis are of Sephardic origin. Many of these Jews come from Arab lands and share the same physical skin color. — Natalie Portman

Walking back across the St-Esprit bridge, to the ghetto I'd instinctively gravitated toward, I mentally erected a more appropriate statue on the square. It would depict an unknown Sephardic Jew, kneeling over a stone tripod covered with crushed cacao beans destined for a cup of chocolate for one of the gentiles of Bayonne.
It would be a symbolic piece, executed in smooth, chocolate-hued marble, and dedicated to all the other forgotten heroes--coffee-drinking Sufi dervishes, peyote-eating Native Americans, Mexican hemp-smokers--who, throughout history, have faced the wrath of all the sultans, drug czars, and Vatican clerics who have resorted to any spurious pretext to squelch one of the most venerable and misunderstood of human drives: the desire to escape, however briefly, everyday consciousness. — Taras Grescoe

It's clear to me that one can't be Jewish without Israel. Religious or non-religious, Zionist or non-Zionist, Ashkenazi or Sephardic - all these will not exist without Israel. — Elie Wiesel

Southern culture is vivified, made a culture, by the melding of influences that are held far more closely than in other, lesser parts of the country: in the Southland, the past is not really past, and the ancestral homelands are not so far away as they are elsewhere, paradoxically: the assimilation of Southerners, unlike the uneasy attempts at assimilation of Americans elsewhere, has created a culture in which the old influences in our blood, of the Ivory Coast, Languedoc, the Highlands, Wales, Antrim, and Devon, of Sephardic communities from Amsterdam to Cadiz, of the Caribbean sugar islands and Castile, have been absorbed into the fabric of New World life. — Markham Shaw Pyle

Even though I grew up as a Sephardic Jew in Brooklyn where we ate Syrian food and went to temple, it was still America. — Isaac Mizrahi

[Biographical info on Rita]
Born and raised in a Sephardic Jewish family in which culture and love of learning were categorical imperatives, she abandoned religion and embraced atheism. She devoted herself to Science, getting to the point of renouncing marriage for scientific research.
... Unlike other people, Rita Levi Montalcini was a complete human being. — Rita Levi-Montalcini

In a mouse we admire God's creation and craft work. The same may be said about flies. — Martin Luther