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Isaac Quotes (0-)
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About Isaac
Isaac (Hebrew: יִצְחָק, Arabic: اسحاق) is one of the three patriarchs of the Israelites and an important figure in the Abrahamic religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He was the son of Abraham and Sarah, the half-brother of Hagar's son Ishmael, the father of Jacob and Esau, and the grandfather of the twelve tribes of Israel.
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“A critical event in Isaac's life occurred when God's command came that he should be offered as a sacrifice on a mountain in the land of Moriah (Gen. xxii. 2). Isaac showed himself in this trial to be worthy of his father. Without murmuring he suffered himself to be bound and laid upon the altar. But Abraham was prevented by God from consummating the sacrifice, and a ram that happened to be near was offered instead.”
“וַיֹּ֨אמֶר יִצְחָ֜ק אֶל־אַבְרָהָ֤ם אָבִיו֙ וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אָבִ֔י וַיֹּ֖אמֶר הִנֶּ֣נִּֽי בְנִ֑י וַיֹּ֗אמֶר הִנֵּ֤ה הָאֵשׁ֙ וְהָ֣עֵצִ֔ים וְאַיֵּ֥ה הַשֶּׂ֖ה לְעֹלָֽה׃ וַיֹּ֙אמֶר֙ אַבְרָהָ֔ם אֱלֹהִ֞ים יִרְאֶה־לּ֥וֹ הַשֶּׂ֛ה לְעֹלָ֖ה בְּנִ֑י
• Genesis 22:7–8
• Translation:”
• Genesis 22:7–8
• Translation:”
“The next major figure in the Bible is Abraham, the spiritual ancestor of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Abraham has a nephew, Lot, who settles in Sodom. Because the residents engage in anal sex and comparable sins, God immolates every man, woman, and child in a divine napalm attack. Lot’s wife, for the crime of turning around to look at the inferno, is put to death as well. Abraham undergoes a test of his moral values when God orders him to take his son Isaac to a mountaintop, tie him up, cut his throat, and burn his body as a gift to the Lord. Isaac is spared only because at the last moment an angel stays his father’s hand. For millennia readers have puzzled over why God insisted on this horrifying trial. One interpretation is that God intervened not because Abraham had passed the test but because he had failed it, but that is anachronistic: obedience to divine authority, not reverence for human life, was the cardinal virtue. Isaac’s son Jacob has a daughter, Dinah. Dinah is kidnapped and raped—apparently a customary form of courtship at the time, since the rapist’s family then offers to purchase her from her own family as a wife for the rapist. Dinah’s brothers explain that an important moral principle stands in the way of this transaction: the rapist is uncircumcised. So they make a counteroffer: if all the men in the rapist’s hometown cut off their foreskins, Dinah will be theirs. While the men are incapacitated with bleeding penises, the brothers invade the city, plunder and destroy it, massacre the men, and carry off the women and children. When Jacob worries that neighboring tribes may attack them in revenge, his sons explain that it was worth the risk: “Should our sister be treated like a whore?” Soon afterward they reiterate their commitment to family values by selling their brother Joseph into slavery.”
“The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery. People enslave, rape, and murder members of their immediate families. Warlords slaughter civilians indiscriminately, including the children. Women are bought, sold, and plundered like sex toys. And Yahweh tortures and massacres people by the hundreds of thousands for trivial disobedience or for no reason at all. These atrocities are neither isolated nor obscure. They implicate all the major characters of the Old Testament, the ones that Sunday-school children draw with crayons. And they fall into a continuous plotline that stretches for millennia, from Adam and Eve through Noah, the patriarchs, Moses, Joshua, the judges, Saul, David, Solomon, and beyond. According to the biblical scholar Raymund Schwager, the Hebrew Bible “contains over six hundred passages that explicitly talk about nations, kings, or individuals attacking, destroying, and killing others. . . . Aside from the approximately one thousand verses in which Yahweh himself appears as the direct executioner of violent punishments, and the many texts in which the Lord delivers the criminal to the punisher’s sword, in over one hundred other passages Yahweh expressly gives the command to kill people.” Matthew White, a self-described atrocitologist who keeps a database with the estimated death tolls of history’s major wars, massacres, and genocides, counts about 1.2 million deaths from mass killing that are specifically enumerated in the Bible. (He excludes the half million casualties in the war between Judah and Israel described in 2 Chronicles 13 because he considers the body count historically implausible.) The victims of the Noachian flood would add another 20 million or so to the total. The good news, of course, is that most of it never happened. Not only is there no evidence that Yahweh inundated the planet and incinerated its cities, but the patriarchs, exodus, conquest, and Jewish empire are almost certainly fictions. Historians have found no mention in Egyptian writings of the departure of a million slaves (which could hardly have escaped the Egyptians’ notice); nor have archaeologists found evidence in the ruins of Jericho or neighboring cities of a sacking around 1200 BCE. And if there was a Davidic empire stretching from the Euphrates to the Red Sea around the turn of the 1st millennium BCE, no one else at the time seemed to have noticed it.”
Isaac Quotes by Topic
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Isaac on Gravity 8 quotes
“You sometimes speak of Gravity as essential and inherent to Matter. Pray do not ascribe that Notion to me; for the Cause of Gravity is what I do not pretend to know, and therefore would take more Time to consider it.”
Isaac on Science 6 quotes
“There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.”
Isaac on Vegetarianism 5 quotes
“Many refined people will not kill a fly, but eat an ox.”
Isaac on Genius 5 quotes
View all 5 quotes on Genius →Isaac on Science fiction 5 quotes
“Science fiction is that branch of literature that deals with human responses to changes in the level of science and technology.”
Isaac on The Forward 5 quotes
“Newspapers published many articles about the terrible conditions on Ellis Island. Among these newspapers was the Jewish Daily Forward, the major Yiddish-language daily in America. In 1909 the Forward received a letter signed by one hundred Jewish men and boys who were being held on Ellis Island, describing their bitter lot and the dreadful conditions in which they were held. The protests and articles generated by this letter forced Washington to take notice of the problem.”
Isaac on The Bible 4 quotes
View all 4 quotes on The Bible →Isaac on The Baroque Cycle 4 quotes
“"Space and Time! Two minor omissions that no one is likely to notice."”
Isaac on God 4 quotes
“This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all, and on account of His dominion He is wont to be called Lord God, Universal Ruler.”
Isaac on Time 4 quotes
“I consider time as flowing or increasing by continual flux & other quantities as increasing continually in time & from ye fluxion of time I give the name of fluxions to the velocitys wth wch all other quantities increase. ...I expose time by any quantity flowing uniformly and represent its fluxion by an unit, & the fluxions of other quantities I represent by any other fit symbols... This Method is derived immediately from Nature her self.”
Isaac on Luminiferous aether 4 quotes
“And so, supposing that light impinging on a refracting or reflecting ethereal superficies puts it into a vibrating motion, that physical superficies being by the perpetual applause of rays always kept in a vibrating motion, and the ether therein continually expanded and compressed by turns, if a ray of light impinge on it when it is much compressed, I suppose it is then too dense and stiff to let the ray through, and so reflects it; but the rays that impinge on it at other times, when it is either expanded by the interval between two vibrations or not too much compressed and condensed, go through and are refracted.”
Isaac on Death 3 quotes
View all 3 quotes on Death →Isaac on Solitude 3 quotes
View all 3 quotes on Solitude →Isaac on Heaven 3 quotes
View all 3 quotes on Heaven →Isaac on Absurdism 3 quotes
“Secrecy as deep as this is past possibility without nonexistence as well.”
Isaac on Motion 3 quotes
“I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.”
Isaac on Truth 3 quotes
“Plato is my friend — Aristotle is my friend — but my greatest friend is truth.”
Isaac on Literature 3 quotes
“Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honours or of wealth.”
Isaac on Analysis 3 quotes
“The investigation of difficult things by the method of analysis ought ever to precede the method of composition.”
Isaac on Natural philosophy 3 quotes
“And thus much concerning God; to discourse of whom from the appearances of things, does certainly belong to Natural Philosophy.”
Isaac on Book of Daniel 3 quotes
“Daniel was in the greatest credit amongst the Jews, till the reign of the Roman Emperor Hadrian. And to reject his prophecies, is to reject the Christian religion. For this religion is founded upon his prophecy concerning the Messiah.”
Isaac on Son of man 3 quotes
“Who is a liar, saith John, but he that denyeth that Jesus is the Christ? He is Antichrist that denyeth the Father & the Son. And we are authorized also to call him God: for the name of God is in him. Exod. 23.21. And we must believe also that by his incarnation of the Virgin he came in the flesh not in appearance only but really & truly , being in all things made like unto his brethren (Heb. 2 17) for which reason he is called also the son of man.”
Isaac on Economics 2 quotes
View all 2 quotes on Economics →What Isaac Said About Others
Discover personal opinions Isaac shared regarding contemporaries.
Isaac on Iris Kyle 16 quotes
“That's no slight on Debi— Iris is just that good.”
Isaac on Benjamin Disraeli 8 quotes
View all 8 quotes on Benjamin Disraeli →Isaac on Yiddish 3 quotes
“Yiddish, the language which will ever bear witness to the violence and murder inflicted on us, bear the marks of our expulsions from land to land, the language which absorbed the wails of the fathers, the laments of the generations, the poison and bitterness of history, the language whose precious jewels are the undried, uncongealed Jewish tears.”
Isaac on Nikki Haley 3 quotes
“But when Trump first declared, Haley was an early critic. In February 2016, she said she would not endorse Trump, explaining that he is “everything a governor doesn’t want in a president.” She continued to criticize him as she campaigned with Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, whom she had endorsed for president. Then Haley reversed course when Trump became the nominee, and she landed the type of position in his administration that would provide her with the foreign policy experience she’d need for a presidential run: US ambassador to the United Nations. She could plausibly claim to have taken the position to serve her country – not Trump. Her approach seemed to work. She had good standing among staunch Trump supporters but had not alienated those who considered themselves moderates and Never Trumpers when she left her position at the UN. As a South Carolina voter who had sworn off the Republican Party, I was even intrigued by what she had pulled off.”
Isaac on Jacob 2 quotes
View all 2 quotes on Jacob →Isaac on Leon Trotsky 2 quotes
“Proof of Trotsky's farsightedness is that none of his predictions have come true yet.”
Isaac on Kafui Danku 2 quotes
“What I feel about criticisms, I believe in everything you do, you will need people to criticise you so you can pick the productive one to improve on your work.”
Isaac on John W. Campbell 2 quotes
“[Stanley] Weinbaum met the challenge of a demand John Campbell was to make of his writers in later years: "Write me a story about an organism that thinks as well as a man, but not like a man."”
Isaac on George Gershwin 2 quotes
“The composer does not sit around and wait for an inspiration to walk up and introduce itself…Making music is actually little else than a matter of invention aided and abetted by emotion. In composing we combine what we know of music with what we feel.”
Isaac on Abraham Cahan 2 quotes
“Mr. Cahan, who became well known as a talented author with his novel, The Rise of David Levinsky, and other works, was a strong advocate of realism. He not only printed realistic stories by well-known writers but made an effort to bring the reality of Jewish life in America into his newspaper. Through light articles he inspired and encouraged the readers to write to the Forward about any unusual events in their own lives, and about their own problems. Mr. Cahan firmly believed that "truth is stranger than fiction," and as far back as 1903 planned a special feature for the newspaper in which the readers could express themselves, a section of the paper which would mirror real life...He maintained that the Forward should not devote itself exclusively to trade unionism, to political and social problems. From the outset, he broadened the interests of the paper and enlivened it with varied reading material, including light articles dealing with daily life. The daily newspaper thus drew readers from all strata and classes.”
Isaac on Andrew Grove
“Technology happens, it's not good, it's not bad. Is steel good or bad?”
Isaac on Philip José Farmer
“Excellent science fiction writer; in fact, a far more skillful writer than I am.”
About Isaac
Isaac (Hebrew: יִצְחָק, Arabic: اسحاق) is one of the three patriarchs of the Israelites and an important figure in the Abrahamic religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He was the son of Abraham and Sarah, the half-brother of Hagar's son Ishmael, the father of Jacob and Esau, and the grandfather of the twelve tribes of Israel.