Quotes & Sayings About The Western Wall

The great achievement of Western culture since the Enlightenment is to make many of us peer over the wall and grant some respect to people outside it; the great failure of Western Culture is to deny that walls are inevitable or important. — James Q. Wilson

In my office in Jerusalem, there's an ancient seal. It's a signet ring of a Jewish official from the time of the Bible. The seal was found right next to the Western Wall, and it dates back 2,700 years, to the time of King Hezekiah. Now, there's a name of the Jewish official inscribed on the ring in Hebrew. His name was Netanyahu. — Benjamin Netanyahu

Boy oh boy, this man is trouble. He was slowly tearing down the wall she'd built around her heart, brick by brick. Could any man be this perfect? He must have some faults. Maybe he is a chauvinist pig ... no, doesn't seem like it. He is kind to animals and children, he is a fireman, he looks like sex on a stick. What could be wrong with him? Maybe he snores. Oh, wouldn't I like to find out? — Tamara Hoffa

There are people accusing me that I'm sick, that I'm a danger to morals, western civilization and basically everything under the sun. And they've got these wild stories about me, completely off the wall, completely untrue. They thought them up and it makes you wonder what goes on in their brain, but of course, they don't consider themselves sick. They think they're normal because they don't dress like I do. — Marilyn Manson

Wealth from trade was the mainspring of Western material advance; the visible agents of change were great guns. These came of age in Europe in the 15th century. On land their potency in reducing castle walls favoured central over local power, since in general only monarchs could afford siege-trains; so nation-states were consolidated and extended into great territorial empires. At sea, guns transformed sailing ships into mobile castles virtually impregnable to opponents who lacked equally powerful ordnance. With the ocean-going gunned warship, western Europe began to extend around the globe. — Peter Padfield

He was swaying back and forth with their daughter gazing adoringly into his face from the cradle of his arms. "I'm going to do my best to make sure your life is awesome, but it won't always be. Those are the times you need to dance in the kitchen the most. It's good for your soul."
Beth sighed and leaned her head against the corner of the wall, as enchanted as Lily by the soft, tender timbre of his voice.
"You don't even need music," he told Lily. "You can dance to the music in your head. Hopefully not to that country-and-western shit your mother listens to, though. Oh ... damn. Don't say shit, Lily-bean. Or if you do and Mommy hears you, don't tell her you heard it from me, okay? Tell her Uncle Mike said it. — Shannon Stacey

Gazing over the holy sites in Jerusalem, Obama wrote these words: From the promenade above Jerusalem, I looked down at the Old City, the Dome of the Rock, the Western Wall, and the Holy Sepulcher, considered the two thousand years of war and rumors of war that this small plot of land had come to represent, and pondered the possible futility of believing that this conflict might someday end in our lifetime, or that America, for all its power, might have any lasting say over the course of the world. I don't linger on such thoughts, though - they are the thoughts of an old man. A young man, too. — Mark Landler

Don't do anything quickly, Tag had told him. And whatever you do, don't hit your brakes. You'll end up in the ditch.

He caught something in his headlights. It took him a moment to realize what he was seeing before his heart took off at a gallop.

A car was upside down in the middle of the highway, its headlights shooting out through the falling snow toward the river, the taillights a dim red against the steep canyon wall. The overturned car had the highway completely blocked. — B. J. Daniels

Eleven men and women, exhausted, battered, and armed with captured weapons, against fifty battle-armored foes desperate to kill them. Every one of those eleven knew exactly what their odds of living through the next three minutes were, but it didn't matter. They were all that stood between six hundred civilians and cold-blooded murder, and Alicia's green eyes were hard as she watched the gaps being punched through the western wall.
"Make it count, people," she said, almost conversationally. — David Weber

When I touched my hand against the Western Wall and placed my prayer between its ancient stones, I thought of all the centuries that the children of Israel had longed to return to their ancient homeland. When I went to Sderot and saw the daily struggle to survive in the eyes of an eight-year-old boy who lost his leg to a Hamas rocket, and when I walked among the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem, I was reminded of the existential fear of Israelis when a modern dictator seeks nuclear weapons and threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the map - face of the Earth. — Barack Obama

Palestine, as Icelanders see it, includes the Western Wall of the Second Temple, Judaism's holiest site. — Elliott Abrams

The following evening as they rode up onto the western rim they lost one of the mules. It went skittering off down the canyon wall with the contents of the panniers exploding soundlessly in the hot dry air and it fell through sunlight and through shade, turning in that lonely void until it fell from sight into a sink of cold blue space that absolved it forever of memory in the mind of any living thing that was. — Cormac McCarthy

That evening we sat in the courtyard of the hotel once more, watching the sun sink below the western isles. I told Alexi what had happened that day. I fancied I could glimpse the grey stone wall of Lismore House on its island hilltop, the red light of the setting sun glinting from the windows, and from there the wasted frame of Jonathan Blake gazing out across the sea, on nothing, his boy waiting for him to die. But it was my fantasy, simply the image on my mind, like the image burned on to your eyes when you have stared too long at the sun, the passing footprint of a creature long gone. — P.B. North

The name Mary Jo Quinn was written neatly in faded blue marker on the front of the scrapbook, its gray edges frayed with age and wear, as though it had been handled often. Such a memento was a strange thing to find in a used bookstore, especially when one considered its contents. I'd discovered the handmade tome buried on the bottom shelf on the back wall of a little musty-smelling shop in the tiny resort town of Copper Harbor. This picturesque community is the gateway to Isle Royale National Park, an island in the western quarter of Lake Superior that beckoned to hikers, kayakers and canoers. Copper Harbor is the northern-most bastion of civilization in Michigan on a crooked finger of land called the Keweenaw Peninsula. Its remote, pristine shoreline provided an excellent respite from a hellacious year for my best friend from high school and me on a late September weekend. — Nancy Barr

She needed him inside her. Now. "It's past time to put your money where your mouth is."
"You got that all in reverse, sweetheart." He cut off the water and backed her slowly to the wall, his lips curving into a dangerous smile. "It's time to put my mouth where your honey is. — Victoria Vane

I can't help feeling as if this is my last chance, Evan said. He was sitting opposite Dr. Lorne, a psychiatrist at the Havilland Recovery Cabin in north western New Jersey. It was the next to the last day of his fourth pass through a twenty-eight day program for sex and alcohol addiction. The sex addiction was questionable; the alcohol was not. — Ryan Field

The highway from the airport into town was one of the ugliest stretches of road I'd ever seen in my life. The whole landscape was a desert of hostile black rocks, mile after mile of raw moonscape and ominous low-flying clouds. Captain Steve said we were crossing an old lava flow. Far down to the right a thin line of coconut palms marked the new Western edge of America, a lonely-looking wall of jagged black lava cliffs looking out on the white-capped Pacific. We were 2,500 miles west of The Seal Rock Inn, halfway to China, and the first thing I saw on the outskirts was a Texaco station, then a McDonald's hamburger stand. — Hunter S. Thompson

It was in this apartment, also, that there stood against the western wall, a gigantic clock of ebony. It's pendulum swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang; and when the minute-hand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to be stricken, there came from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical, but of so peculiar a note and emphasis that, at each lapse of an hour, the musicians of the note orchestra were constrained to pause, momentarily, in their performance, to harken to the sound and thus the waltzers perforce ceased their evolutions; and there was a brief disconcert of the whole gay company; and, while the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observes that the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as in confessed revery or meditation — Edgar Allan Poe

The shot was so precise that the bullet went out his forehead and shattered a whisky bottle against the wall behind the counter. — Justin Bienvenue

Our Western press soldiers from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, etc. (often 1 correspondent for every 200 million Chinese), happily manufacture stories, demonize the Chinese government, and fabricate heroes, saviors, and incidents for China, at will. — Thorsten J. Pattberg

No Western nation has to build a wall round itself to keep its people in. — Margaret Thatcher

In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top - the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation - and the plants at the bottom. But in Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as "the younger brothers of Creation." We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn - we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example. They've been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

I traveled with then-Senator Obama to Israel in 2008. I will never forget our time in the holy city of Jerusalem and following behind him as he approached the Western Wall - and even in the dark hours of that very early morning, it was a place bustling with energy afforded by one's faith. — Denis McDonough

NATO was constructed on the - with the reason, whether one believes it or not, that it was going to defend Western Europe from Russian assault. Once the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union was beginning to collapse, that reason was gone. So, first question: why does NATO exist? — Noam Chomsky

The perfect symmetry between the dismantling of the wall of shame and the end of limitless Nature is invisible only to the rich Western democracies. The various manifestations of socialism destroyed both their peoples and their ecosystems, whereas the powers of the North and the West have been able to save their peoples and some of their countrysides by destroying the rest of the world and reducing its peoples to abject poverty. Hence a double tragedy: the former socialist societies think they can solve both their problems by imitating the West; the West thinks it has escaped both problems and believes it has lessons for others even as it leaves the Earth and its people to die. The West thinks it is the sole possessor of the clever trick that will allow it to keep on winning indefinitely, whereas it has perhaps already lost everything. — Anonymous

The widely mis-interpreted 1998 'meltdown' of East Asia was a financial symptom of the renewed reality: In fact, it was the first round the world recession again to begin in East Asia and spread from there to the West, instead of vice versa. That marked the beginnings of the return back 360 degrees around the world of the world economic center to Asia where it had always been before those two eighty-year period of temporary Western ascendance. The stock market crash in Hong Kong and the devaluation of the Thai baht and the Indonesian rupia took only 80 seconds to make themselves felt in the London City and on New York's Wall Street. How much of a cultural lag do we still need for popular perception and social theory to catch up with global reality? — Andre Gunder Frank

The Knesset is in Israel, and the Western Wall is in Israel, and the sooner the Obama administration realizes this, the closer it will be to a Middle East policy worthy of our country and its long alliance with our ally in Jerusalem - which is, actually, the capital of the state of Israel. — Elliott Abrams

In Udi's vocabulary, Jewish was equated with the ills of exile: rootless parasitic, superstitious. Yet here, in the Western Wall's solitary dignity, was beauty. In this world of stone, he felt softness; in this quarry of memory, peace. — Yossi Klein Halevi

So we rode through a broken gate in a broken wall into a broken town, and it was dusk, and the day's rain had finally lifted, and a shaft of red sunlight came from beneath the western clouds as we entered the ruined town. We rode straight into the light of that swollen sun which reflected from my helm that had the silver wolf on its crest, and it shone from my mail coat and from my arm rings and from the hilts of my two swords, and someone shouted that I was the king. I rode Witnere, who tossed his great head and pawed at the ground, and I was dressed in my shining war glory. — Bernard Cornwell