Education Quote by Shimon Peres

Peres packages a lifetime in power into a sentence that performs humility while quietly asserting authority. “I was learning” sounds modest, even self-effacing, but the phrase “as I did in the Ministry of Defense” drags that modesty into the hardest arena a statesman can claim: national survival, secrecy, irreversible decisions. He’s not talking about book learning; he’s talking about the kind of knowledge that arrives late, under pressure, with consequences attached.

The pivot is the paradox: “I never knew, but I always learned.” It’s a rebuke to the political pose of certainty. Leaders are expected to project mastery; Peres offers a different ethic, one that treats governance as perpetual apprenticeship. The subtext is both moral and tactical. Moral, because it frames responsibility as ongoing self-correction rather than ideology. Tactical, because it lets him reinterpret past missteps not as failures of judgment but as data collected in real time.

Context matters: Peres’s career stretched from Israel’s formative years through wars, nuclear ambiguity, party realignments, and the Oslo era’s fragile optimism. In that arc, “never knew” reads less like confession than like realism about the limits of intelligence, forecasts, and control. The line also flatters the listener indirectly: if even the defense minister “never knew,” then uncertainty isn’t weakness; it’s the baseline. What earns legitimacy, Peres implies, is not omniscience but the discipline of learning faster than events can punish you.