Best 88 quotes of Golda Meir on MyQuotes

Golda Meir

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    Ability hits the mark where presumption overshoots and diffidence falls short.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    Above all, this country is our own. Nobody has to get up in the morning and worry what his neighbors think of him. Being a Jew is no problem here.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    A leader who doesn't hesitate before he sends his nation into battle is not fit to be a leader.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    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?

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    Anybody who believes in something without reservation believes that this thing is right and should be, has the stamina to meet obstacles and overcome them.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    Any one who speaks in favor of bringing the Arab refugees back must also say how he expects to take the responsibility for it, if he is interested in the state of Israel. It is better that things are stated clearly and plainly: We shall not let this happen.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    As President Nixon says, presidents can do almost anything, and President Nixon has done many things that nobody would have thought of doing.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    A story once went the rounds of Israel to the effect that Ben-Gurion described me as 'the only man' in his cabinet. What amused me about is that he (or whoever invented the story) thought that this was the greatest compliment that could be paid to a woman. I very much doubt that any man would have been flattered if I had said about him that he was the only woman in the government!

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    At work, you think of the children you have left at home. At home, you think of the work you've left unfinished. Such a struggle is unleashed within yourself. Your heart is rent.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    Being seventy is not a sin. It's not a joy, either.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    But the individual was not a tool for something. He was the maker of tools. He was the one who must build. Even for the best purpose it is criminal to turn an individual into simply a means for some ultimate end. A society in which the dignity of the individual is destroyed cannot hope to be a decent society.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    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?

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    Can we today measure devotion to husband and children by our indifference to everything else?

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    Don't become cynical. Don't give up hope. Don't believe that everything is judged only by expediency. There is idealism in this world. There is human brotherhood.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

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

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    Fashion is an imposition, a reign on freedom.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    From Russia I didn't bring out a single happy memory, only sad, tragic ones. The nightmare of pogroms, the brutality of Cossacks charging young Socialists, fear, shrieks of terror.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    Glorious bouquets and storms of applause are the trimmings which every artist naturally enjoys.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

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

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    I can honestly say that I was never affected by the question of the success of an undertaking. If I felt it was the right thing to do, I was for it regardless of the possible outcome.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    I don't know why you use a fancy French word like detente when there's a good English phrase for it - cold war.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    I don't want to have a bad influence on anybody, but there's no point in my giving up cigarettes now. I won't die young.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    If only political leaders would allow themselves to feel, as well as to think, the world might be a happier place.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    I have always felt sorry for people afraid of feeling, of sentimentality, who are unable to weep with their whole heart. Because those who do not know how to weep do not know how to laugh either.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    I have given instructions that I be informed everytime one of our soldiers is killed, even if it is in themiddle of the night. When President Nasser leavesinstructions that he is to be awakened in the middleof the night if an Egyptian soldier is killed, there willbe peace.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    I'm a slave to this leaf in a diary that lists what I must do, what I must say, every half hour.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    I'm sure that someday children in schools will study the history of the men who made war as you study an absurdity. They'll be shocked, just as today we're shocked with cannibalism.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    I must govern the clock, not be governed by it.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    I never did anything alone. Whatever was accomplished in this country was accomplished collectively.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    Israel itself is the strongest guarantee against another Holocaust.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    It is a dreadful thing to see the dead city. Next to the port I found children, women, the old, waiting for a way to leave. I entered the houses, there were houses where the coffee and pita bread were left on the table, and I could not avoid [thinking] that this, indeed, had been the picture in many Jewish towns [i.e., in Europe, during World War II].

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    It is always much easier, I have discovered, to make people cry or gasp than to make them think.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    It is not a sin to be seventy but it is also no joke.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    It is not only a matter, I believe, of religious observance and practice. To me, being Jewish means and has always meant being proud to be part of a people that has maintained its distinct identity for more than 2,000 years, with all the pain and torment that has been inflicted upon it.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

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

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    It is true we have won all our wars, but we have paid for them. We don't want victories anymore.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    It's no accident many accuse me of conducting public affairs with my heart instead of my head. Well, what if I do?.. Those who don't know how to weep with their whole heart don't know how to laugh either.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    I want to say to you, friends, that the Jewish community in Palestine is going to fight to the very end. If we have arms to fight with, we will fight with those, and if not, we will fight with stones in our hands.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    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!

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    Men who have reached and passed forty-five, have a look as if waiting for the secret of the other world, and as if they were perfectly sure of having found out the secret of this.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    My dear, old age is like an airplane flying in a storm. Once you're in it there's nothing you can do. You can't stop a plane, you can't stop a storm, you can't stop time. So you might as well take it easy, with wisdom.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    Not being beautiful was the true blessing. Not being beautiful forced me to develop my inner resources. The pretty girl has a handicap to overcome.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you're aboard, there's nothing you can do.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

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

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    One of the first sights that shocked me, when I came to Israel in 1921, was an Arab turning over a field with a very primitive plow; pulling the plow were an ox and a woman. Now, if it means that we have destroyed this romantic picture by bringing in tractors, combines, and threshing machines, this is true: we have.

  • By Anonym
    Golda Meir

    Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself.