Golda Meir Quotes

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.

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...

There will be peace in the Middle East only when the Arabs love their children more than they hate Israel.

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.

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.

The world hates a Jew who hits back. The world loves us only when we are to be pitied.

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.

Those that perished in Hitler's gas chambers were the last Jews to die without standing up to defend themselves.

We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs; we have no place to go.

We can forgive you for killing our children, but we can never forgive you for making us kill your children.

The only way to eliminate war is to love our children more than we hate our enemies.

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?

Don't be humble... you're not that great.

Israel itself is the strongest guarantee against another Holocaust.

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!

We say peace and the echo comes back from the other side, war. We dont want wars even when we win.

Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life.

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.

It isnt enough to believe in something; you have to have the stamina to meet obstacles and overcome them, to struggle.

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.

You'll never find a better sparring partner than adversity.

The only alternative to war is peace and the only road to peace is negotiations.

America is a great country. It has many shortcomings, many social inequalities, and it's tragic that the problem of the blacks wasn't solved fifty or even a hundred years ago, but it's still a great country, a country full of opportunities, of freedom! Does it seem nothing to you to be able to say what you like, even against the government, the Establishment?

We don't thrive on military acts. We do them because we have to, and thank God we are efficient.

How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to.