Still, he thought, it was remarkable and a mystery not yet explained why contemporary men, who could watch the birds and animals and see that it was the male who was gaudy in decoration, had decided that among human beings this fundamental law should be reversed.

A woman requires jewelry as a man requires food.It was instructive and accurate to imagine earliest man as living for most of his first two million years within an insulation of stupidity, not fully differentiating himself from the physical world, the spiritual world, or the world of the other sentient animals.Having partially conquered nature, they were now a prey to it. it was a rule of life that the Family of Ur was discovering: the more committed a family becomes to a given project, the more vulnerable it also becomes.But the fear which the family was now discovering was of another kind: it sprang from the slow-maturing apprehension regarding the relationship of man to his world, the gnawing suspicion that perhaps things were not so simple as they seemed on this average autumn day when ripening grain hid in the stalks and a rumor of deer echoed in the forest.You need these people very much, Cullinane, but we can’t spare them and you’re too frightened to take them.” They’re built by the units we saw tonight. Symphonies and cathedrals are not built by the children of upper-middle-class families.

that work, productive work, is the salvation of man, and especially of the Jew.

The Source by James A. Michener