Golda Meir Quotes

Don't be so humble - you are not that great.

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.

Those who do not know how to weep with their whole heart don't know how to laugh either

When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.

Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.

Not being beautiful was the true blessing. Not being beautiful forced me to develop my inner resources. The pretty girl has a handicap to overcome.

Let me tell you the one thing I have against Moses. He took us forty years into the desert in order to bring us to the one place in the Middle East that has no oil!

To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don't be.

Whether women are better than men I cannot say ... but i can say they are certainly no worse.

Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life.

There's no difference between one's killing and making decisions that will send others to kill. It's exactly the same thing, or even worse.

Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you're aboard there's nothing you can do.

Don’t be so humble, you’re not that great.

I must govern the clock, not be governed by it.

I'm sure that someday children in schools will study the history of the men [sic] who made war as you study an absurdity. They'll be shocked, just as today we're shocked with cannibalism.

Fashion is an imposition, a rein on freedom.

My dear, old age is like an airplane flying in a storm. Once you're in it there's nothing you can do. You can't stop a plane, you can't stop a storm, you can't stop time. So you might as well take it easy, with wisdom.

Don't be humble. Your not that great.

It is true we have won all our wars, but we have paid for them.

The Soviet government is the most realistic regime in the world - no ideals

There is no Zionism except the rescue of Jews.

It isn't really important to decide when you are very young just exactly what you want to become when you grow up. It is much more important to decide on the way you want to live. If you are going to be honest with yourself and honest with your friends, if you are going to get involved in causes which are good for others, not only for yourselves, then it seems to me that that is sufficient, and maybe what you will be is only a matter of chance.

A story once went the rounds of Israel to the effect that Ben-Gurion described me as 'the only man' in his cabinet. What amused me about is that he (or whoever invented the story) thought that this was the greatest compliment that could be paid to a woman. I very much doubt that any man would have been flattered if I had said about him that he was the only woman in the government!

The dog that trots about finds a bone.

Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.

In Israel, we read from right to left. [To Henry Kissinger, US Secretary of State, who had written her that he considers himself 'an American first, Secretary of State second, and a Jew third']

A leader who doesn't hesitate before he sends his nation into battle is not fit to be a leader.

You'll never find a better sparring partner than adversity.

It's not what you gather, but what you scatter that tells what kind of life you have lived.

ولقد تعلمت في تلك الأيام درسا هاما غير سياسي، وهو أن الأمور لا تحدث فجأة، وأنه لا يكفي أن يؤمن المرء بشيء ما وإنما يجب أن يكون لديه الجلد على مواجهة العقبات والكفاح من أجل قهرها.

Don't be so humble, you're not that great

Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself.

Golda Meir had told Anwar Sadat: “We can forgive you for killing our children, but we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.

Come to think of it, I am more than a little tired of hearing about how the Jews ‘stole’ land from Arabs in Palestine. The facts are quite different. A lot of good money changed hands, and a lot of Arabs became very rich indeed.

I can honestly say that I was never affected by the question of the success of an undertaking. If I felt it was the right thing to do, I was for it regardless of the possible outcome.

I have given instructions that I be informed every time one of our soldiers is killed, even if it is in the middle of the night. When President Nasser leaves instructions that he is to be awakened in the middle of the night if an Egyptian soldier is killed, there will be peace.

Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.

The study showed women who were slower to smile in corporate life were perceived as more credible." As Missy talked, I began to think about history-making women like Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Madeleine Albright, and other powerful women of their ilk. Not one was known for her quick smile. Missy continued, "The study went on to say a big, warm smile is an asset. But only when it comes a little slower, because then it has more credibility." From that moment on,

Golda Meir once said, ‘I fear the war with the Arabs will go on for years because of the indifference with which their leaders send their people off to die.’ She also said, ‘Peace will come when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.’” Kayla gestured at the people eating their lunch.

ولأول مرة منذ كنت طفلة تفزعني أصوات حوافر خيول القوقاز في روسيا، أدركت في إيفيان أنه لا يكفي للضعيف أن يعرض عدالة قضيته فقط. وهكذا فإنه إذا كان على كل أمة أن تجيب على السؤال الأزلي "نكون ولا نكون" كل بطريقتها، فإن اليهود لم يكونوا – ولا يجب أن يكونوا – في حاجة إلى تصريح من أحد بالبقاء.

I don’t know why you use a fancy French word like détente when there’s a good English phrase for it — cold war.

Don't be so humble, you are not that great.

We don't thrive on military acts, we do them because we have to, and thank God [that] we are efficient.

We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs; we have no place to go.

كان الملك عبد الله صغير الجسم، رابط الجأش، ذا سحر أخاذ. وبعد تناول القهوة، دخل إلى لب الموضوع مباشرة. فهو لن ينضم إلى أي هجوم عربي ضدنا، وسيبقى كما – كما قال – صديقا لنا، وهو يريد السلام مثلنا، ثم إن عدونا كان واحدا وهو الحاج أمين الحسيني مفتي القدس. ولم يكتف بذلك، بل اقترح أن نلتقي ثانية بعد أن تنتهي الأمم المتحدة من التصويت.

A cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new, and even the habit of denying entire nations and creating fake countries has a long pedigree. In 1931 the Japanese army staged mock attacks on itself to justify its invasion of China, and then created the fake country of Manchukuo to legitimise its conquests. China itself has long denied that Tibet ever existed as an independent country. British settlement in Australia was justified by the legal doctrine of terra nullius (‘nobody’s land’), which effectively erased 50,000 years of Aboriginal history. In the early twentieth century a favourite Zionist slogan spoke of the return of ‘a people without a land [the Jews] to a land without a people [Palestine]’. The existence of the local Arab population was conveniently ignored. In 1969 Israeli prime minister Golda Meir famously said that there is no Palestinian people and never was. Such views are very common in Israel even today, despite decades of armed conflicts against something that doesn’t exist. For example, in February 2016 MP Anat Berko gave a speech in the Israeli Parliament in which she doubted the reality and history of the Palestinian people. Her proof? The letter ‘p’ does not even exist in Arabic, so how can there be a Palestinian people? (In Arabic, ‘f’ stands for ‘p’, and the Arabic name for Palestine is Falastin.)

This is why Said means so much to me, he said. You see, Said was young when he heard that statement made by Golda Meir, that there are no Palestinian people, and when he heard this, he became involved in the Palestinian question. He knew then that difference is never accepted. You are different, okay, but that difference is never seen as containing its own value. Difference as orientalist entertainment is allowed, but difference with its own intrinsic value, no. You can wait forever, and no one will give you that value.

There may be no great honor in running away, but worse than that is continuing like an idiot.

لقد وجد "اللاجئون الفلسطينيون" (كنتيجة) لرغبة العرب ومحاولاتهم لتدمير إسرائيل، ولم يوجدوا (بسبب) إسرائيل.

وأذكر أن عبد الناصر قال لأحد الوسطاء الذين أرسلناهم إليه، لو أن بن جوريون جاء إلى القاهرة للتحدث معي فسوف يعود بطلا، أما إذا ذهبت إليه أنا فسوف أقتل عند عودتي.

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

Dont be so humble you're not that great

It has never ceased to astonish me that the Arab states have been so eager to go to war against us. Almost from the very beginning of Zionist settlement until today, they have been consumed by hatred for us.

واغرورقت عيناي بالدموع وارتعشت يداي، فهذه هي دولة إسرائيل. لقد عملناها وصنعنا دولة إسرائيل. وأنا جولدا مابوفيتش مايرسون، قد عشت لأرى هذا اليوم. ولا يهم الثمن الذي قد يدفعه أي منا، فلقد أعدنا خلق الوطن القومي اليهودي.

Stateswoman Golda Meir once wrote: “Trust yourself. Create the kind of self you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of higher achievement.

وكان يجب علي في صباح يوم الجمعة هذا أن أستمع إلى إنذار قلبي وأستدعي الاحتياطي وآمر بالتعبئة. إن هذه الحقيقة - بالنسبة لي - لا يمكن أن تنمحي. وليس هناك أي عزاء فيما قد يقوله أحد أو في كل التهدئة والتحجج بالعقل الذي حاول زملائي تهدئتي به.

ولعله مما يدعو إلى المرارة أن أكتب عن إلياهو الآن. في عالم آثر أن يضفي رونقا على الإرهاب العربي، وأن يدخل إلى هيئة الأمم رجلا مثل ياسر عرفات، الذي لا يملك فكرة بناءة واحدة أو تصرفا يحسب لصالحه، والذي – بصراحة وبوضوح – ليس إلا مجرما عتيدا يرأس حركة كرست نفسها فقط لتدمير دولة إسرائيل. وإنه لإيمان عميق لدي – بل عزاء – أن بذور فشل الإرهاب العربي تكمن في مفهوم الإرهاب نفسه.

Margaret Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Gone With the Wind in 1937. She was 37 years old at the time. Margaret Chase Smith was elected to the Senate for the first time in 1948 at the age of 49. Ruth Gordon picked up her first Oscar in 1968 for Rosemary’s Baby. She was 72 years old. Billie Jean King took the battle of women’s worth to a tennis court in Houston’s Astrodome to outplay Bobby Riggs. She was 31 years of age. Grandma Moses began a painting career at the age of 76. Anne Morrow Lindbergh followed in the shadow of her husband until she began to question the meaning of existence for individual women. She published her thoughts in Gift from the Sea in 1955, at 49. Shirley Temple Black was Ambassador to Ghana at the age of 47. Golda Meir in 1969 was elected prime minister of Israel. She had just turned 71. This summer Barbara Jordan was given official duties as a speaker at the Democratic National Convention. She is 40 years old. You can tell yourself these people started out as exceptional. You can tell yourself they had influence before they started. You can tell yourself the conditions under which they achieved were different from yours. Or you can be like a woman I knew who sat at her kitchen window year after year and watched everyone else do it and then said to herself, “It’s my turn.” I was 37 years old at the time.

ولنكن صرحاء... فمصير الدول الصغيرة يعتمد في النهاية على القوى العظمي التي دائما ما تكون لها مصالح تريد حمايتها، وكنا نريد مواصلة الحرب لإيقاع الهزائم بالمصريين والسوريين وربما لو حصلنا على مزيد من الوقت لتمكننا من تحقيق ذلك، لكن موقف السادات كان أقوى منا وكذلك كانت لديه الوسائل لإقناع روسيا وكانت المراهنات عليه في موسكو مرتفعة جدا حقا، ولذا فإنني لم أفاجأ عنما قعد مجلس الأمن جلسة طارئة فجر 22 أكتوبر وأصدر قرارا يدعو إلى وقف إطلاق النار خلال اثنتي عشرة ساعة.

إنه من أجل أن يبقى الشعب اليهودي كشعب، فلا بد أن تكون هناك دولة يهودية يستطيع اليهود فيها أن يعيشوا كيهود، لا على الآلام ولا كأقلية... ولا بد لي من أن أضيف شيئا حول أن يكون المرء يهوديا، إنني أعتقد أنها ليست مراعاة الشعائر الدينية ومزاولتها، إن كوني يهودية، يعني، وكان يعني، أن أكون جزءا من شعب قاسى طويلا وحافظ على هويته.

Only two years later, in 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir famously proclaimed that “there were no such thing as Palestinians … they did not exist,” and that they never had existed.24 She thereby took the negation characteristic of a settler-colonial project to the highest possible level: the indigenous people were nothing but a lie.

It doesn’t interest me if we cannot explain [our actions] to the world. It will not be because the world doesn’t understand, but because it doesn’t want to understand.

The Soviet government is the most realistic regime in the world — no ideals.

„Moderne Geschichte sollte man nur mit dem Bleistift schreiben.

Between the Mediterranean and the borders of Iraq, in what was once Palestine, there are now two countries, one Jewish and one Arab, and there is no room for a third. The Palestinians must find the solution to their problem together with that Arab country, Jordan, because a ‘Palestinian state’ between us and Jordan can only become a base from which it will be more convenient to attack and destroy Israel.

The British went on fighting like lions against the Germans, the Italians, and the Japanese, but they couldn’t or wouldn’t stand up to the Arabs at all – though much of the Arab world was openly pro-Nazi.

ودخلت إلى قاعة الاجتماعات فوجدت ستين قائدا إفريقيا حول مائدة الاجتماع، وقدمني إلهم بادمور، وما هي إلا لحظة حتى وقف مندوب الجزائر ووجه السؤال إلي مباشرة لماذا يأتيني السلاح من فرنسا وهي الدولة الوحيدة التي تحارب بشراسة في بلده وضد إخوانه الإفريقيين. وبهدوء أشعلت سيجارتي وقلت للجميع أني مضطرة إلى حماية بلدي من جيراني الذين يأتيهم السلاح من الاتحاد السوفييتي وأن البلد الوحيد المستعد لبيع السلاح لي مقابل المال هو فرنسا. وقلت لهم أنه لو كان ديجول هو الشيطان نفسه لمددت إليه يدي لشراء السلاح، فهل كنتم تفعلون مثلي لو كنتم في مكاني؟ وسمعت آهات الارتياح... فقد عرف الإفريقيون أنني لا أكذب عليهم، وانهالت أسئلتهم عليّ عن إسرائيل.

Let me tell you something about Moses,” she would say, not with total originality, and be quoted in The New York Times. “He took us forty years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil.

وكثيرا ما سئلت عما أشعر به نحو الألمان، وأعتقد أن هذا هو المكان الذي يجب أن أرد فيه. لقد حتمت علينا حقائق الحياة، رغم مرارتها، أن نتعامل ونتصل مع ألمانيا بعد الحرب، وبديهي أنه لا يوجد شيء يمكن أن يمحو آثار المجزرة. إن ذكرى الملايين الستة من اليهود لا يجب أن تمحي من ذهن البشرية، ولا يجب إطلاقا أن ينساها أي يهودي أو ألماني. وعلى الرغم من أنني احتجت إلى جهد كبير لكي أطأ أرض ألمانيا عام 1967، فإنني كنت أؤيد التعويضات، وحصولنا على الأموال منهم لكي نبني دولة إسرائيل، وكنت أؤمن أن عليهم دينا كبيرا لنا يجب تسديده حتى يمكننا استيعاب كل من بقى من اليهود على قيد الحياة. بل إنني أعتقد أن وجود إسرائيل في حد ذاته ضمان حتى لا تتكرر المجزرة.

Let me at this juncture deal also with the ridiculous accusation that I have heard for so many years to the effect that we ignored the Arabs of Palestine and set about developing the country as though it had no Arab population at all. When the instigators of the Arab disturbances of the late 1930s claimed, as they did, that the Arabs were attacking us because they had been ‘dispossessed’, I did not have to look up British census figures to know that the Arab population of Palestine had doubled since the start of the Jewish settlement there. I had seen for myself the rate of growth of the Arab population ever since I had first come to Palestine. Not only did the living standard of the Arabs of Palestine far exceed that of Arabs anywhere else in the Middle East, but, attracted by the new opportunities, hordes of Arabs were immigrating to Palestine from Syria and other neighboring countries all through those years. Whenever some kindly representative of the British government sought to shut off Jewish immigration by declaring that there was not enough room in Palestine, I remember making speeches about Palestine’s larger absorptive capacity, complete with statistical references which I dutifully took from British sources, but which were based on what I had actually witnessed with my own eyes. And let me add, there was no time during the thirties that I did not hope that eventually the Arabs of Palestine would live with us in peace and equally as citizens of a Jewish homeland – just as I kept on hoping that Jews who live in Arab countries would be allowed to live there in peace and equality.

As the world learned of the horrors of the Nazi death camps, Pope Pius XII was widely praised for his vigorous and devoted efforts to saving Jewish lives during the war. In 1943, Chaim Weizmann, who would become the first president of Israel, wrote: “the Holy See is lending its powerful help wherever it can, to mitigate the fate of my persecuted co-religionists.”77 Moshe Sharett, soon to be Israel’s first foreign minister and second prime minister, met with the pope during the last days of the war: “I told him that my first duty was to thank him, and through him the Catholic Church, on behalf of the Jewish public for all they had done in various countries to rescue Jews.”78 Upon the pope’s death in 1958, Golda Meir, a future prime minister of Israel, noted his efforts on behalf of the Jews of Europe, calling him “a great servant of peace,”79 for it was well-known among that generation of Israelis that Pope Pius XII had made many personal efforts to protect and shelter Jews from the Nazis.

The one Asian nation with which we have, alas, made no headway whatsoever is China. … The Chinese government, in fact, is totally committed to the Arab war against Israel, and Mr. Arafat and his comrades are constantly given arms, money, and moral support by Peking, though I, for one, have never understood why, and for years, lived under the illusion that if we could only talk to the Chinese, we might get through to them. Two pictures come to my mind when I mention China. The first is the horror with which I picked up a mine manufactured in China – so far away and remote from us – which had put an end to the life of a six-year-old girl in a border settlement in Israel. I stood there near that small coffin, surrounded by weeping, enraged relatives. ‘What on earth can the Chinese have against us?’ I kept thinking. ‘They don’t even know us.’ Then I remember, at the celebration of Kenya’s independence, sitting at a table near that of the Chinese delegation. It was a very relaxed, festive occasion, and I thought to myself, ‘Perhaps if I go over and sit down with them, we can talk a bit.’ So I asked Ehud to introduce himself to the Chinese. He walked over, held out his hand to the head of the delegation and said, ‘My foreign minister is here and would like to meet you.’ The Chinese just averted their gaze. They didn’t even bother to say, ‘No, thank you, we don’t want to meet her.

Alan Greenspun, a fearless Las Vegas businessman, and a cadre of colorful characters, including such underworld ones as Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky.

everything,” recalled a woman who heard Golda at the Astor. “He said to me, ‘The only thing we have left, honey, is some paid life insurance policies. Do you want them now or when I’m gone?’ I said, ‘Of course, I’ll take them now.’ We got up and announced

When Henry Kissinger, then the U.S. secretary of state, declared that he was first an American, second secretary of state, and third a Jew, Golda Meir supposedly responded to him by saying, “That’s fine, Henry. But in Hebrew everything is written from right to left.

Bedouin

Land of Palestine—“a land without a people, and a people without a land.” Blackstone gave language, pithy and poetic, to an idea that would recur repeatedly in Zionist thought: that the Palestinian people did not exist. “It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine, considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country from them,” argued Golda Meir.

Yo debo gobernar el reloj, no ser gobernada por él”. —Golda Meir

The dog that trots about finds a bone.” Golda Meir

Nixon quickly laid Golda’s fears to rest. Despite reams of memoranda from his staff warning him not to succumb to the Israeli prime minister’s charms, alone with the grandmotherly woman for more than an hour and a half, Nixon couldn’t resist her. “I remember so well when we sat down in the chairs in the Oval Office, and the photographers came in…and we were shaking hands, and she was smiling and making the right friendly comments,” Nixon recalled. “Then the photographers left the room. She crossed her legs, lit a cigarette and said, ‘Now, Mr. President, what are you going to do about those planes that we want and we need very much?’…Golda Meir acted like a man and wanted to be treated like a man. There is no question that she was a very strong, intelligent leader in her own right.

Russian Jews remember just forty-three years earlier the arrests in 1905. Rumors were spread by the government that the czar had granted a constitution. This ruse exposed those who wanted a constitution. Anyone seen rejoicing in the streets, was swept up in mass arrests.

Don’t be so humble–you’re not that great.” Golda Meir

how it is that Israel is capable of absorbing Jewish refugees, hundreds of thousands from Arab lands, and yet Arabs refuse to absorb the Arab refugees from Palestine or allow the land of Transjordan (now called Jordan), taken from the region of Palestine, to be used for these refugees.9

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present. —Golda Meir

I remember so well when we sat down in the chairs in the Oval Office, and the photographers came in…and we were shaking hands, and she was smiling and making the right friendly comments,” Nixon recalled. “Then the photographers left the room. She crossed her legs, lit a cigarette and said, ‘Now, Mr. President, what are you going to do about those planes that we want and we need very much?’…Golda Meir acted like a man and wanted to be treated like a man. There is no question that she was a very strong, intelligent leader in her own right.

GAZA-ISRAEL BORDER The peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate ours Golda Meir. Israeli Prime Minister 1973

The legendary U.S. investigative journalist I. F. Stone supported the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, even embedding himself on one of the clandestine boats, crowded with Holocaust survivors, that eventually made it to safety in “stucco-colored Haifa” in 1946. But after the 1967 war, he conceded, “For the Zionists, the Arab was the Invisible Man. Psychologically he was not there.” Or as the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir put it, “There was no such thing as Palestinians … They did not exist.

Israeli

Before the Jews could implement Plan D, however, they needed more arms. And that meant money. There was only one source for the money: American Jewry. Golda Meir, having grown up in Milwaukee, was dispatched to the United States on a desperate mission to raise the money. She arrived with no luggage and no prepared speech for a meeting of Jewish fund-raising organizations in Chicago. The audience did not know who she was. The stout, determined woman from Palestine told her listeners: The Jewish community in Palestine is going to fight to the very end. If we have arms to fight with, we will fight with them. If not, we will fight with stones in our hands. I

La estadista Golda Meir escribió una vez: «Confía en ti mismo. Sé la persona con la que te haría feliz vivir el resto de tu vida. Saca el máximo partido de ti avivando las diminutas chispas interiores de las posibilidades para que ardan las llamas de logros mayores».

Meanwhile King ‘Abdullah of Transjordan had his own ambitions to dominate as much as possible of Palestine, having done his best to come to terms with both the Zionists and his British backers over his plans for the country. As Avi Shlaim reports in Collusion Across the Jordan, his account of this era, extensive clandestine contact took place between King ‘Abdullah and Jewish Agency leaders (later Israeli prime ministers) Moshe Sharett and Golda Meir.30 As the United Nations moved toward partition of Palestine, the king repeatedly met with them secretly in the hope of reaching an accord in which Jordan would incorporate the part of Palestine to be designated for its Arab majority. The king confidently gave them his assurances that the Palestinians would come around and assent to his rule.* Thus ‘Abdullah, unlike Iraq’s Nuri, had no use for any form of independent Palestinian leadership or for a body like the Arab Office that would serve as their diplomatic arm.

The exact extent of collaboration between Israel and Iran’s feared secret police, the Savak, is unclear. What the documents show are senior Iranian officials requesting that the Israeli Defense Forces [IDF] train bodyguards for their use. The Shah wanted to purchase Israeli planes and tanks and the Israelis were amenable to his request. From the late 1960s there is communication between Iranian and Israelis officials that outlines the negotiations. Between 1968 and 1972, Iran had purchased Israeli mortars, radio equipment, and other defense equipment. Israel trained Iranian police officers on its own territory. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir met the Shah in 1972 and said that the co-operation “between countries that stand against communism should be strengthened: Persia, Israel, Turkey and Ethiopia.

I have long studied and admired other crusaders and disruptors. Their pictures adorn the walls of my firm, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Golda Meir, Nelson Mandela, and Steve Jobs. I know, however, that disruption makes people uncomfortable.

It is a unique characteristic of Golda Meir's government that at the very time its army was engaged in combat against the Palestinians, it continued to deny their existence.

How would you explain your rise to leadership?” Dr. Szalita asked. “I don’t know anything about leadership,” Golda replied, typically eschewing theoretical talk. “I can only tell you that I was going to the theater one evening and got on an elevator. Nobody in the elevator bothered to move. So I pressed the button. That’s all I can say about leadership.

But no stretch of the imagination would picture real ovens, mass shootings, or the likes of death camps. “In a way, I suppose, it should be chalked up to the credit of normal decent men and women that we couldn’t believe that such a monstrously evil thing would ever actually happen,” Golda was to say of the Holocaust. “It wasn’t that we were gullible. It was simply that we couldn’t conceive of what was then still inconceivable.

I don’t know anything about leadership,” Golda replied, typically eschewing theoretical talk. “I can only tell you that I was going to the theater one evening and got on an elevator. Nobody in the elevator bothered to move. So I pressed the button. That’s all I can say about leadership.

One can always push oneself a little bit beyond what only yesterday was thought to be the absolute limit of one’s endurance,

In her perseverance, she also devised a novel fund-raising scheme: gather a hundred rich Jews from Palestine into a room and do not allow them to leave until each signs a check for a thousand pounds.

Golda Meir in Israel, Geraldine Ferraro on the Mondale ticket, Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court, Sally Ride in space.