Daily Inspiration Quote by Shimon Peres

There is a quiet audacity in a statesman crediting his political formation not to ideology or strategy, but to reading. Shimon Peres frames “literature” as more than cultural polish; it becomes a civic technology. The line “he actually taught me how to read” splits reading into two acts: decoding words and learning a disciplined way of seeing. For a public figure whose life ran through war, institution-building, and peace negotiations, that distinction matters. Policy is, in part, interpretation: of motives, of histories, of the stories nations tell themselves. Peres is signaling that his mentor trained him in interpretation before he ever had to interpret an adversary or a coalition agreement.

The subtext is also a rebuttal to the myth of the self-made leader. “Personal mentor” is an admission of apprenticeship, almost an ethical credential. In political cultures that reward certainty, he elevates being taught - and being teachable. The repeated “he” underscores a transfer of authority from office to intellect: the mentor’s influence is intimate, not institutional, suggesting that real education happens offstage, away from committees and podiums.

Contextually, Peres belonged to a generation of founders for whom the boundary between culture and statecraft was porous. By anchoring his identity in literature, he places imagination alongside security, implying that the capacity to read deeply is what keeps power from becoming merely managerial. It’s a modest sentence with a big claim: governance begins with how you read the world.