Quotes by Israeli authors

See the complete list of authors from Israel

"There can be no doubt that the average man blames much more than he praises. His instinct is to blame. If he is satisfied he says nothing; if he is not, he most illogically kicks up a row"

Golda Meir, Leader

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

Golda Meir, Leader

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

Golda Meir, Leader

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

Golda Meir, Leader

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

Golda Meir, Leader

"I also was producing, working on other materials for the hydrogen bomb. They call it lithium-6 and tritium. I was working on these and the only use for lithium-6 is the hydrogen bomb"

Mordechai Vanunu, Scientist

"From the sea came a boat with some Israeli commando soldiers who took me by the commando boat to the yacht and put me on the yacht. In the yacht I asked people, who are you. And they said we are Israelis, French and British"

Mordechai Vanunu, Scientist

"I was allowed to meet my family every two weeks for a half hour"

Mordechai Vanunu, Scientist

"I smuggled the camera, it was no problem to smuggle the camera there. And I took 60 photos, two films, during the time when there was no one in the control room, in the building"

Mordechai Vanunu, Scientist

"I couldn't sleep for two years, they tried to break my nerves. They used a lot of psychology to brainwash"

Mordechai Vanunu, Scientist

"We can just assume they have much more and powerful, more advanced technology, all the new computers, everything could be much more easier and help them to build much more and many more nuclear weapons"

Mordechai Vanunu, Scientist

"One of the things I wanted to introduce in The Same Sea beyond transcending the conflict, is the fact that deep down below all our secrets are the same"

Amos Oz, Writer

"I was born and bred in a tiny, low-ceilinged ground-floor apartment"

Amos Oz, Writer

"Well, my definition of a tragedy is a clash between right and right"

Amos Oz, Writer

"I wrote The Same Sea not as a political allegory about Israelis and Palestinians. I wrote it about something much more gutsy and immediate. I wrote it as a piece of chamber music"

Amos Oz, Writer

"I recommend the art of slow reading"

Amos Oz, Writer

"I find the family the most mysterious and fascinating institution in the world"

Amos Oz, Writer

"But The Same Sea is set precisely in this Israel, which never makes it to the news headlines anywhere. It is a novel about everyday people far removed from fundamentalism, fanaticism nationalism, or militancy of any sort"

Amos Oz, Writer

"In many ways, I regard Sharon and Arafat as birds of a feather"

Amos Oz, Writer

"But for 30 years, Orthodox leaders have tipped the balance between hawks and doves, and have been in a position to determine who forms a coalition and who runs the country"

Amos Oz, Writer

"A conflict begins and ends in the hearts and minds of people, not in the hilltops"

Amos Oz, Writer

"It is crystal clear to me that if Arabs put down a draft resolution blaming Israel for the recent earthquake in Iran it would probably have a majority, the U.S. would veto it and Britain and France would abstain"

Amos Oz, Writer

"If we don't stop somewhere, if we don't accept an unhappy compromise, unhappy for both sides, if we don't learn how to unhappily coexist and contain our burned sense of injustice - if we don't learn how to do that, we end up in a doomed state"

Amos Oz, Writer

"I wrote a novel about Israelis who live their own lives on the slope of a volcano. Near a volcano one still falls in love, one still gets jealous, one still wants a promotion, one still gossips"

Amos Oz, Writer

"I have seen for the first time in 100 years of conflict, the two peoples - the Israeli people and the Palestinian people - are ahead of their leaderships"

Amos Oz, Writer

"All of my novels are democracies"

Amos Oz, Writer

"You can't achieve anything without getting in someone's way"

Abba Eban, Diplomat

"Time and again these governments have rejected proposals today - and longed for them tomorrow"

Abba Eban, Diplomat

"The Jews are the living embodiment of the minority, the constant reminder of what duties societies owe their minorities, whoever they might be"

Abba Eban, Diplomat

"Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other alternatives"

Abba Eban, Diplomat

"Lest Arab governments be tempted out of sheer routine to rush into impulsive rejection, let me suggest that tragedy is not what men suffer but what they miss"

Abba Eban, Diplomat

"It is our experience that political leaders do not always mean the opposite of what they say"

Abba Eban, Diplomat

"If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions"

Abba Eban, Diplomat

"I think that this is the first war in history that on the morrow the victors sued for peace and the vanquished called for unconditional surrender"

Abba Eban, Diplomat

"His ignorance is encyclopedic"

Abba Eban, Diplomat

"Consensus is what many people say in chorus but do not believe as individuals"

Abba Eban, Diplomat

"Better to be disliked than pitied"

Abba Eban, Diplomat

"A statesman who keeps his ear permanently glued to the ground will have neither elegance of posture nor flexibility of movement"

Abba Eban, Diplomat

"A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually"

Abba Eban, Diplomat

"The things I learned from the army - and I think it was a lesson for life - was how to work in unison with other people. How to take responsibility"

Oded Fehr, Actor

Page 5 of 12