Quotes from Shimon Peres

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 should use our imagination more than our memory.

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.

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

If you have more dreams than achievements-you're young.

without emboldening people to envisage the unlikely, we increase risk rather than diminish it.

The choice the pioneers faced was stark: succeed or starve.

Whoever of you love life and desire to see many good days, keep your tongue from evil and your lips from telling lies. Seek peace and pursue it.

The tools of his trade included faith, perseverance, resilience, and the ability to learn—to change and to grow. But his greatest tool of all, always, was hope.

We spoke often of Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, who argued that the future of the Jewish people depended on the existence of a Jewish state, one bonded together not just by religion but by language and nationality. "Let them give us sovereignty over a piece of the earth's surface, just sufficient for the needs of our people. Then we will do the rest.

From the darkness of my hiding place, I would ask God to forgive the transgressors and have mercy on every man, as he himself had sown the seeds of weakness.

My greatest hope is that our children, like our forefathers, will continue to plow the historical Jewish furrow in the field of the human spirit; that Israel will become the center of our heritage, not merely our homeland; and that the Jewish people will both be inspired by others and a continued source of inspiration.