Shimon Peres Quotes
"I think I was a good student, because I jumped over a school. My main interest was basically history and literature. Sports were basically basketball and swimming at a pool. I was so happy."
- Shimon Peres
(Related: History, Sports, Basketball, Interest, Literature, School)
"I joined the army as a private. I was offered a rank at that time, but I refused. I preferred to remain a private. First of all, I wasn't taken by ranks, and before I knew it, they put me in the most sensitive positions anyway."
- Shimon Peres
(Related: Time, Army, First, Rank)
"I have a brother younger than me. My mother was a librarian, so from her, I got the taste to read."
- Shimon Peres
(Related: Mother, Brother, Taste)
"He was the editor of our paper. He created the publishing house in Hebrew. He was - I wouldn't say the "guru" - but really he was our teacher and a most respected man. I wrote for the paper of the youth movement."
- Shimon Peres
(Related: Man, Publishing, Youth)
"He taught me literature, and he actually taught me how to read. He was my personal mentor."
- Shimon Peres
(Related: Literature)
"Early in the morning, I fell in love with the girl that later on became my wife. At that time, we were so naive. I wanted to charm her, so I read her Capital by Marx. I thought somehow she would be convinced by the strength of his criticism about capital."
- Shimon Peres
(Related: Love, Time, Wife, Thought, Strength, Charm, Criticism)
"I was learning, as I did in the Ministry of Defense. I never knew, but I always learned."
- Shimon Peres
(Related: Defense, Learning)
"Now, I learned soon enough, that among the three, two don't trust the third one - the third one is the government. Both industry and unions feel the government is a talking organization and a spending organization."
- Shimon Peres
(Related: Government, Trust, Now, Talking)
"I worked with a group of people who argued day and night - professors, officials, the Minister of Finance - but there were decisions that I had to make."
- Shimon Peres
(Related: Finance, People, Day, Decisions, Night)
"Later on, there were some problems with our navy, so he made me the head of the navy - all things that I hardly knew anything about. I was basically an ignorant young man."
- Shimon Peres
(Related: Man, Navy, Problems)
"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."
- Shimon Peres
(Related: First)
"Television has made dictatorship impossible but democracy unbearable."
- Shimon Peres
(Related: Democracy, Dictatorship, Television)
"That was my first lesson from Ben-Gurion. Then I saw him making peace, and I saw him making war. He mobilized me before the war. The man was a very rare combination between a real intellectual and a born leader. There is a contradiction between the two."
- Shimon Peres
(Related: Peace, War, Leader, Contradiction, First, Man)
"There was one occasion when I was very young - eight years or seven years old - that Jewish businessmen went through the forest, and they were assassinated. And that was for the first time I saw in our paper where there were assassinations in our place."
- Shimon Peres
(Related: Time, First, Old, Years)
"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."
- Shimon Peres
(Related: Thought, Negative, Judgment, Man, Nothing, Parents, Pressure, Word)
"We asked the workers to give up 25 percent of their salaries. Imagine! We asked the industrialists to freeze all costs, no matter what the inflation is."
- Shimon Peres
(Related: Inflation, Workers)
"If I tax them, in fact, I'm not taxing the capitalists, I am taxing the people who have saved, trusted. It was very controversial, those sorts of things. But finally, it worked out."
- Shimon Peres
(Related: People, Fact, Tax)