"We do not rejoice in victories. We rejoice when a new kind of cotton is grown and when strawberries bloom in Israel."
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Quote collection
Golda Meir quotes (page 1 of 5)
93 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present."
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"Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement."
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"We can forgive [the Arabs] for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with [the Arabs] when they love their children more than they hate us..."
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"Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life."
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"Don't be humble... you're not that great."
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"You'll never find a better sparring partner than adversity."
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"The Egyptians could run to Egypt, the Syrians into Syria. The only place we could run was into the sea, and before we did that we might as well fight."
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"There is no such thing as a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist."
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"I must govern the clock, not be governed by it."
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"Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!"
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"It isn't really important to decide when you are very young just exactly what you want to become when you grow up. It is much more important to decide on the way you want to live. If you are going to be honest with yourself and honest with your friends, if you are going to get involved in causes which are good for others, not only for yourselves, then it seems to me that that is sufficient, and maybe what you will be is only a matter of chance."
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"By the way, did you ever realize that if Moses would have turned right instead of left, we'd have had the oil, the Arabs would have had the sand?"
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"Ability hits the mark where presumption overshoots and diffidence falls short."
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"Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself."
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"If we have to have a choice between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we'd rather be alive and have the bad image."
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"Once in a Cabinet we had to deal with the fact that there had been an outbreak of assaults on women at night. One minister suggested a curfew; women should stay home after dark. I said, 'But it's the men who are attacking the women. If there's to be a curfew, let the men stay home, not the women."
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"The world hates a Jew who hits back. The world loves us only when we are to be pitied."
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"The only way to eliminate war is to love our children more than we hate our enemies."
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"We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs; we have no place to go."
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