“The Samaritans (whose beginnings were pre-Josianic) have a Pentateuch quite similar to the familiar Jewish Pentateuch. …our Pentateuchal text was fairly well established before the rift between the Samaritans and Judeans.”

— Cyrus H. Gordon

Source: The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962]), Ch.VIII Further Observations on the Bible

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Cyrus H. Gordon 73

American linguist 1908–2001

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Source: The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962]), Ch.VIII Further Observations on the Bible

“No-one would remember the Good Samaritan if he'd only had good intentions; he had money as well.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

TV Interview for London Weekend Television Weekend World (6 January 1980) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=104210
First term as Prime Minister

“Were it not for this inalterable armony, pre-established by God, between subject and object, all our thinking would be necessarily without fruit.”

Robert Mayer (1814–1878) German physicist

As translated by Julio Antonio Gonzalo (2008) in The Intelligible Universe: An Overview of the Last Thirteen Billion Years . World Scientific. p. 297
Naturwissenschaftliche vorträge (1871). p. 31
Original: Was aber subjektiv richtig gedacht ist, ist auch objektiv wahr, Ohne diese von Gott zwischen der subjektiven und objektiven Welt prästabilierte ewige Harmonie wäre all unser Denken unfruchtbar

“For some time I debated over whether I should start these memoirs at the beginning or at the end, that is, whether I should put my birth or my death in first place. Since common usage would call for beginning with birth, two considerations led me to adopt a different method: the first is that I am not exactly a writer who is dead but a dead man who is a writer, for whom the grave was a second cradle; the second is that the writing would be more distinctive and novel in that way. Moses, who also wrote about his death, didn't place it at the opening but at the close: a radical difference between this book and the Pentateuch.”

Machado de Assis (1839–1908) Brazilian writer

Algum tempo hesitei se devia abrir estas memórias pelo princípio ou pelo fim, isto é, se poria em primeiro lugar o meu nascimento ou a minha morte. Suposto o uso vulgar seja começar pelo nascimento, duas considerações me levaram a adotar diferente método: a primeira é que eu não sou propriamente um autor defunto mas um defunto autor, para quem a campa foi outro berço; a segunda é que o escrito ficaria assim mais galante e mais novo. Moisés, que também contou a sua morte, não a pôs no intróito, mas no cabo: diferença radical entre este livro e o Pentateuco.
Source: As Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881), Ch. 1 (opening words), p. 7.

Alan Shepard (1923–1998) American astronaut

Discussing the 1967 Apollo 1 fire and 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster incidents — reported in The Deseret News staff (May 7, 1995) "Even Cosmos Is Aghast at Size of Earthly Egos", The Deseret News, p. A2.

“The sentiments attributed to Christ are in the Old Testament. They were familiar in the Jewish schools and to all the Pharisees, long before the time of Christ, as they were familiar in all the civilizations of the earth — Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian, Greek, and Hindu.”

Joseph McCabe (1867–1955) British writer

The Sources of the Morality of the Gospels (1914).

“The Good Samaritan was not a Hebrew. He was not one of “the chosen people.” He was a poor, “miserable heathen,” who knew nothing about the Jehovah of the Old Testament, and who had never heard of the “scheme of salvation.” And yet, according to Christ, he was far more charitable than the Levites—the priests of Jehovah, the highest of “the chosen people.” Is it not perfectly plain from this story that charity was in the world before Christianity was established?”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

A Christmas Sermon (1890)

“You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like 'Finnegans Wake' and Picasso.”

Philip Larkin (1922–1985) English poet, novelist, jazz critic and librarian

“The stance against abortion is the pre-eminent priority. How could it not be? We have to get it right from the beginning. Our stance on life, that is our pre-eminent priority. We have to fight against this evil.”

Michael Francis Burbidge (1957) American Catholic bishop

The Walk Humbly Podcast - Episode 39: Protecting children online, priority of abortion, homelessness pilot project, and more! https://www.arlingtondiocese.org/bishop/walk-humbly-podcast/the-walk-humbly-podcast---episode-39/ (18 November 2019)

“India possesses, it is true, a class of texts that proclaims to be a history of the subcontinent, the Puranas. ….. Nevertheless, they have been used uncritically, e. g., by some historians such as R. Thapar, and by modern archaeologists as materials to establish their identifications of particular pre-historic cultures.”

Michael Witzel (1943) German-American philologist

1990. On Indian Historical Writing. pp. 1-57 in ‘Nihon Minami Ajia Gakkai: Hatsubai Tokyo Daigaku Shuppanaki. Tokyo

“The Samaritans (whose beginnings were pre-Josianic) have a Pentateuch quite similar to the familiar Jewish Pentateuch. …our Pentateuchal text was fairly well established before the rift between the Samaritans and Judeans.”

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Cyrus H. Gordon 73

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