Aging & Wisdom Quote by Shimon Peres

Power often arrives disguised as improvisation, and Peres makes that improvisation sound almost indecently casual. “Problems with our navy” is the kind of understatement that hints at existential stakes without naming them. Then comes the punch: he’s appointed to run it while “hardly” knowing anything about it. The line’s intent isn’t confession for confession’s sake; it’s a political origin story that smuggles in a larger claim about state-building: in a young country, competence is frequently assembled in real time, under pressure, by people learning at the speed of necessity.

The subtext is twofold. First, it quietly normalizes a governance style built on urgency and trust rather than credentialing. Peres isn’t just admitting ignorance; he’s reframing it as a shared condition of the era. Second, it signals a certain Israeli political mythology: the pioneer-leader drafted into impossible roles because there’s no established bureaucracy to hide behind. When he says “he made me,” the passive grammar matters. Authority flows from a singular decision-maker in a tight circle, suggesting how concentrated power was in the early state and how personal networks substituted for institutions.

Context does the rest. Peres came of age alongside Israel’s founding, when defense infrastructure was a crash course and “navy” could mean survival, deterrence, arms procurement, and diplomatic friction rolled into one. Calling himself “basically an ignorant young man” reads as humility, but it’s also a way to underline legitimacy: I was there at the messy beginning, promoted into responsibility before the rulebook existed. That’s not just memory; it’s a claim to historical weight.