Shimon Peres Quotes

The most important thing in life is to dare. The most complicated thing in life is to be afraid. The smartest thing in the world is to try to be a moral person.

Optimists and pessimists die the exact same death, but they live very different lives!

When you have two alternatives, the first thing you have to do is to look for the third that you didn't think about, that doesn't exist.

You're as young as your dreams, not as old as your calendar

It's better to be controversial for the right reasons, than to be popular for the wrong reasons.

If a problem has no solution, it may not be a problem, but a fact - not to be solved, but to be coped with over time.

To find a cause that's larger than yourself and then to give your life to it.

We should use our imagination more than our memory.

I don't think anybody who carries a rifle carries the future. Because I don't believe that you can really change the world by killing and shooting. You have the change it by creating and competing.

A solution of two national states - a Jewish state, Israel; an Arab state, Palestine. The Palestinians are our closest neighbors. I believe they may become our closest friends.

For me, dreaming is simply being pragmatic.

I think peace should be done not only among governments but among people. It was impossible before the Facebook.

From my earliest youth, I have known that while one is obliged to plan with care the stages of one's journey, one is entitled to dream, and keep dreaming, of its destination.

You can kill a thousand; you can bring an end to life; you cannot kill an idea.

If you eat three times a day, you become fat. If you read three times a day, you become wise. It's better to be wise than fat.

It's a morality that keeps humans human.

Television has made dictatorship impossible but democracy unbearable.

There is in England a saying that an anti-Semite is someone who hates the Jews more than is necessary.

Our problem is not to submit to the differences but to overcome them.

The president of Iran should remember that Iran can also be wiped off the map.

One of the most important branches of the Egyptian economy is tourism. No bikinis, no tourism. So they have to decide what to do.

Leading the Jewish people is not easy -- we are a divided, obstinate, highly individualistic people who have cultivated faith, sharp wittedness and polemics to a very high level.

We are the only country who is an ally of the United States that never asked for American soldiers.

You know when civilization began? With the invention of the mirror.

The internet, Facebook and Twitter have created mass communications and social spaces that regimes cannot control.

They thought that I was a man with reasonable judgment, so I was never under pressure from my parents; I could do whatever I wanted. I never had a negative word from them, nothing whatsoever.

When it becomes a bloody reality, we have to come together and look at what can be done to return to the order of peace, ... There is no alternative to it.

In the past, most wars were motivated by the idea of nationhood. Today, however, wars are incited above all using religion as an excuse.

In every war, there are always elements of blindness.

Today, Israel is stronger than ever. Israel has defensive tools of its own - those developed in the past and those developed today and those that will be developed tomorrow.

Israel is moving from the realm of poetry to the realm of prose.

Many Syrians understand that the only option that exists is the option of peace, which means the option of compromise, .. Nobody can have 100 percent of his desires. He must compromise.

Without freedom you cannot have real peace.

I am leaving the office but am not leaving the battle for peace.

Why cross and ocean when you can cross a river? Why should we sail to Washington when we can meet right away 10 miles from here?

And this would normalize the existence of the Israeli and the Jew: a majority of Jews in the Land of Israel and a majority of Israelis among the Jewish People.

Iran is a great problem, but not necessarily a great country. In fact, I think it is a very weak country.

Governments have budgets but no money, companies have money but no budgets.

He taught me literature, and he actually taught me how to read. He was my personal mentor.

Polls are like perfume-nice to smell, dangerous to swallow.

[Hamas] thought that if you go to elections you become a democrat for the rest of your life. They think that democracy is limited to one day in four years.

I do not know anybody that is threatening Iran. It is a safe country.

In many ways, the media today makes dictatorship impossible. But it also makes democracy intolerable.

If world is suspicious that Israel may detonate nuclear bomb and if the suspicion is a deterrent - that's good enough.

In any democratic country you have more than one view.

Nothing had excited me-the huge cars, the entourages, the bodyguards, the policeman jumping to attention, all meant nothing to me ... till I came to the old man's office. (On becoming prime minister)

The problem of the Middle East is poverty more than politics.

In the Middle East, the conflict today is a matter of generations and not of cultures.

The minute you try to threaten and use boycotts I think it is outside the democratic perception.

Israel is a start-up nation, and I think it can be done in other places. I will do it outside the government. I don't need the government.