Emma Lazarus Quotes

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

The Jewish problem is as old as history, and assumes in each age a new form. The life or death of millions of human beings hangs upon its solution; its agitation revives the fiercest passions for good and for evil that inflame the human breast.

Thou two-faced year, Mother of Change and Fate...

Until we are all free, we are none of us free.

Jews are the intensive form of any nationality whose language and customs they adopt.

Still ours the dance, the feast, the glorious Psalm, The mystic lights of emblem, and the Word.

Let our first care today be the re-establishment of our physical strength, the reconstruction of our national organism, so that in future, where the respect due to us cannot be won by entreaty, it may be commanded, and where it cannot be commanded, it may be enforced.

Life's sharpest rapture is surcease of pain.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

I am never going to write for the sake of writing.

Thick February mists cling heavily To the dead earth and to each leafless tree, And closer down upon the hilltops draw, Dull forecasts there of bright, sure-coming spring; Yet the heart gathers hope and strange delight From this dear, unlovely, wished-for sight Of leaden-misted twilights lengthening.

My own curiosity and interest are insatiable.