Golda Meir Quotes

I don't accept the Zionist idea.

'I don't say a Zionist must be insane,' said President Weizmann, 'but it helps if he is.'

As long as I'm needed. I'll be ready to serve. I look forward with optimism. We need the Jews here. Move to Israel! Move to Israel!

I am a Zionist. You don't have to be a Jew to be a Zionist.

Zionism

The Jewish State Der Judenstaat

Jews outside Israel live in permanent contradiction. I think they should come home.

I was born in Israel, to Canadian parents. My father immigrated in 1948, part of a wave of young men and women who came as pioneers, to fight for a Jewish homeland. Their motive was in large part a reaction to the Holocaust, and their slogan was 'Never Again.'

At the age of nineteen and a half, I went to the Land of Israel to till its soil and live by the labour of my hands. As I did not find work, I sought my livelihood elsewhere.

While we all could agree that the Zionist ideal is alive and well, there is serious doubt whether the Zionist movement can be said to be an ongoing proposition, fragmented as its components are in ideology and in practice.

There is no question that Israelis - indeed, all concerned Jews - have to continue to work out a Jewish public philosophy that truly justifies a Jewish state in the land of Israel.

I have no fear that the candle lighted in Palestine years ago will ever be put out.

Most students have thoughts about emigrating to Israel. A significant number go on aliyah. We are proud of our Israel programs, which come at a considerable cost to the university.

I've never understood the division between so-called realists and so-called idealists.

I take satisfaction ... in the progress of the Zionist movement.

If ever I have the occasion to help in the restoration of the Jewish people to Palestine, I shall surely do so.

Water is the basis for Jewish existence in the Land of Israel.

We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement …. We all wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.

For thousands of years, we Jews have been nourished and sustained by a yearning for our historic land …. I believed and to this day still believe in our people's eternal and historic right to this entire land.

When I was a child, Israel was a legend more than a reality. She emerged from a dream, and today she has surpassed that dream.

The Jewish journey started in the land of Israel, and it always strove to return there against all odds and all limitations.

The politics of hope is harder to spread than the politics of hate.

Aliyah is the central goal of the State of Israel.

The whole Zionist project was based on a whole spectrum of different and even conflicting dreams and visions.

Were I to sum up the Basle Congress in a word- which I shall guard against pronouncing publicly- it would be this: 'At Basle, I founded the Jewish State. If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. If not in 5 years, certainly in 50, everyone will know it.'