“Over the past few years, the road to confrontation has shown its consequences: loss of innocent lives, destruction and fear. Most costly, however, was the loss of hope.”

For me, I am left leaning when it comes to health and education, on the right when it comes to defense. So I don’t know where I come on the political spectrum. And I think this the challenge that a lot of Jordanians have to deal with.

The global system they hope to create is one of new walls and new isolation, and radically smaller horizons. It is an anti-democratic, anti-economic-growth, and anti-progress agenda.

I like to look at the glass half full.

That frustration does translate into the political sphere when people are hungry and without jobs.

I believe nuclear energy in Jordan will be done in such a way where it is a public-private partnership so everyone can see exactly what’s going on.

If you have a government that is elected, they need to do the hard work – because if they don’t, they won’t be around the next time the ballot box is open.

And no matter what’s happening in the Middle East – the Arab Spring, et cetera, the economic challenges, high rates of unemployment – the emotional, critical issue is always the Israeli-Palestinian one.

Today more than ever we need creative minds to address the issues of the age. And one of the most urgent is this: How can humanity know so much, achieve so much, and still fail so many people so badly?

Each country its cost analysis is going to be different. So what we are you seeing in Syria, for example, is different than what’s going on in Jordan. The maps are being rewritten.

There is resistance to change. There’s a resistance to ideas.

I hope that none of the countries in the Middle East are planning anything but the peaceful utilization of nuclear energy.

Through Hamas, Iran has been able to buy itself a seat on the table in talking about the Palestinian issue. And, as a result, through Hamas it does play a role in the issue of the Palestinians, as strange as that should sound.

There is a tendency by a lot of officials to hide behind the king. And it’s about time that officials take their responsibility and are responsible in front of the people.

Blowing up buses will not induce the Israelis to move forward, and neither will the killing of Palestinians or the demolition of their homes and their future.

If everybody is happy, then something is wrong with the democratic process.

The Arab Spring I think we will look back whether it’s two years, five years, ten or fifteen. And say it’s a good thing.

Worry does not mean fear, but readiness for the confrontation.

The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from hosts and myths.

Regimented minds cannot grasp the concept of confrontation as an open exchange of major differences with a view to settlement through genuine dialogue.

This was due to a kind of increased existential awareness that resulted from this confrontation with the death of another. And I think it brought them in touch with their own death, so they began to experience a kind of preciousness to life that comes with an experience of its transiency.

Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one’s actions.

It is our honest response to the grandeur and mystery of reality our confrontation with that which transcends the given.

Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one’s actions. Source: The Wisdom of Heschel

When there’s a status quo, usually what shakes everybody up is some sort of military confrontation, at which point we all come running and screaming to pick up the pieces.