“There are four on whose pots the Holy One, blessed he, knocked, only to find them filled with piss, and these are they: Adam, Cain, the wicked Balaam, and Hezekiah."Again, an abrupt transposition from the divine to the domestic, from upper to lowly spheres, occurs in the midrash. The homely image of the Holy One knocking on pots apparently derives from the practice of tapping on a clay or earthen pot to hear its ring in order to decide if it is worthy of holding wine. In current Hebrew usage, the expression 'to assess or gauge someone's pot' still denotes taking in the measure of a person's character. From Adam's answer to God, we learn that he turned out to be a pisspot.”

“Power,' as the sociologist Nachman Ben-Yehuda writes, 'enters the picture in two ways': the first entails constructing and legitimizing the moral system itself; the second, in enforcing it. In this view, 'deviants are those who simply do not have enough power to prevent others from defining them as such'.”

“As Atwood concludes after a random and informal sampling, men and women differ markedly in the 'scope of their threatenability': 'Why do men feel threatened by woman?' I asked a male friend of mine....'[M]en are bigger, most of the time...and they have on the average a lot more money and power.' 'They're afraid women will laugh at them,' he said. 'Undercut their world view.' Then I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, 'Why do women feel threatened by men?' 'They're afraid of being killed,' they said'.”

“As his dark closet shows, Bluebeard was a collector at heart, and even after dispatching a wife, could not let her fully depart.”

“Life gives us clay; it is we to make a pot out of it! But sometimes it gives us pot; it is again we to keep it in one piece, as a pot! All jobs are ours! Life only gives things and it has no other responsibility!”

“Only one bear eats from this honey pot, Tatia”

“When action is divorced from consequences, no one is happy with the ultimate outcome. If individuals can take from a common pot regardless of how much they put in it, each person has an incentive to be a free rider, to do as little as possible and take as much as possible because what one fails to take will be taken by someone else. Soon, the pot is empty and will not be refilled -- a bad situation even for the earlier takers.”