Last Updated on 21 June 2024

Quotes from Golda Meir (1898-1978)

• Don’t be humble… you’re not that great.
• 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.
• It is always much easier, I have discovered, to make people cry or gasp than to make them think.
• It isn’t 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.
• A leader who doesn’t hesitate before he sends his nation into battle is not fit to be a leader.
• 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!
• 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.
• 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.
• Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard, there’s nothing you can do.
• 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.
• One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.
• The only way to eliminate war is to love our children more than we hate our enemies.
• There is only one thing I hope to see before I die, and that is that my people should not need expressions of sympathy anymore.
• Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart, don’t know how to laugh either.
• To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don’t be.
• 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.
• You’ll never find a better sparring partner than adversity.