Top 100 Shimon Peres Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “We have to take care about nature as much as nature is taking care about us. Nature is very kind with us. And if you want to enjoy the gifts of nature and the promises of nature, we have to defer to nature and its needs, its rules, its norms.”

— Shimon Peres

2. “To find a cause that’s larger than yourself and then to give your life to it.”

— Shimon Peres

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

— Shimon Peres

4. “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.”

— Shimon Peres

5. “The Holocaust is a great warning to us all. We shall never forget our sisters and brothers. We have to ensure it is not repeated and to ensure we never go back to the days when humans behaved as beasts. Forgetfulness is a menace, we must remember.”

— Shimon Peres

6. “It’s better to be controversial for the right reasons, than to be popular for the wrong reasons.”

— Shimon Peres

7. “In Israel, a land lacking in natural resources, we learned to appreciate our greatest national advantage: our minds. Through creativity and innovation, we transformed barren deserts into flourishing fields and pioneered new frontiers in science and technology.”

— Shimon Peres

8. “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.”

— Shimon Peres

9. “You don’t make peace with friends. You make it with very unsavory enemies.”

— Shimon Peres

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

— Shimon Peres

11. “For me, dreaming is simply being pragmatic.”

— Shimon Peres

12. “You’re as young as your dreams, not as old as your calendar.”

— Shimon Peres

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

— Shimon Peres

14. “Until the Yom Kippur War, in 1973, until then Israel didn’t have a chance but to fight for her life. We were attacked five times, outgunned, outnumbered, on a small piece of land, and our main challenge was to remain alive.”

— Shimon Peres

15. “Television has made dictatorship impossible but democracy unbearable.”

— Shimon Peres

16. “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.”

— Shimon Peres

17. “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

18. “We should use our imagination more than our memory.”

— Shimon Peres

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

— Shimon Peres

20. “When a friend makes a mistake, the friend remains a friend, and the mistake remains a mistake”.”

— Shimon Peres

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

— Shimon Peres

22. “Peace is a purpose – a goal worthy of the chase, while war is a function – born out of reluctant necessity.”

— Shimon Peres

23. “I read when I get up in the morning, when I can during the day and every single evening. Most of my weekends are spent reading great books. Books are my constant companions. If you eat three times a day you’ll be fed. But if you read three times a day you’ll be wise.”

— Shimon Peres

24. “We may soon find that peace is made possible not through negotiation but through innovation.”

— Shimon Peres

25. “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.”

— Shimon Peres

26. “I was learning, as I did in the Ministry of Defense. I never knew, but I always learned.”

— Shimon Peres

27. “Ben-Gurion once said that in Israel, “in order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles.” After such extraordinary achievement in science and technology and human creativity, how could we be anything but believers in miracles, faithful to the imaginations that are capable of conceiving them, and committed to the efforts to bring them to life? Ben-Gurion was right: realism in Israel is nothing less than the impossible made real.”

— Shimon Peres

28. “Peace with the Palestinians will open ports of peace all around the Mediterranean. The duty of leaders is to pursue freedom ceaselessly, even in the face of hostility, in the face of doubt and disappointment. Just imagine what could be.”

— Shimon Peres

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

— Shimon Peres

30. “My only regret is not having dreamed more. I got my life as a gift. I’ll give it up without an overdraft.”

— Shimon Peres

31. “I have earned the title of expert, it is only on what was. There is no expert on what will be. And yet, without knowing the future, I remain a man full of hope.”

— Shimon Peres

32. “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.”

— Shimon Peres

33. “There are two things that cannot be achieved in life unless you close your eyes a little bit. And that’s love and peace. If you want perfection you won’t obtain either of them.”

— Shimon Peres

34. “If you have more dreams than achievements-you’re young.”

— Shimon Peres

35. “Israel is moving from the realm of poetry to the realm of prose.”

— Shimon Peres

36. “People prefer remembering to imagining. Memory deals with familiar things; imagination deals with the unknown. Imagination can be frightening – it requires risking a departure from the familiar.”

— Shimon Peres

37. “Look, Israel doesn’t intend to introduce nuclear weapons, but if people are afraid that we have them, why not? It’s a deterrent.”

— Shimon Peres

38. “Germany and Israel should dream together for a Middle East in which all the countries are willing to exchange the dispute of the parents with peace for their children.”

— Shimon Peres

39. “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.”

— Shimon Peres

40. “I was given my life, some two and a half billion seconds: I did some reckoning, and I decided to do something with those seconds so that I might make a difference.”

— Shimon Peres

41. “How did this happen? How did we start up a nation from nothing and transform it into a nation of start-ups? The answer lies in a paradox: having nothing was at once our greatest challenge and our greatest blessing of all. Without natural resources, our hopes were tied to our own creativity.”

— Shimon Peres

42. “If world is suspicious that Israel may detonate nuclear bomb and if the suspicion is a deterrent – that’s good enough.”

— Shimon Peres

43. “Israel was born so Jews could finally cultivate their land with their own hands. But the most important thing to remember is that we depended more upon our brain than our muscle. We learned that the treasures hidden in ourselves are far greater than anything that can be found in the ground.”

— Shimon Peres

44. “Bulgaria is a true friend of Israel, that stood up to save the Jewish people 70 years ago in Europe, and who stood by throughout the terror attack that took place in Burgas last July.”

— Shimon Peres

45. “The history of Israel is divided into two parts. One, under attack that we have had to defend ourselves. When you defend yourself your thinking is totally different from when you want to make peace. So under attack you behave like if you want a hawk, when peace comes you become a dove.”

— Shimon Peres

46. “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.”

— Shimon Peres

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

— Shimon Peres

48. “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?”

— Shimon Peres

49. “Why do you trust that boy?” I would overhear them asking. His answer was always the same. “Three reasons,” he would say. “He doesn’t lie. He doesn’t say bad things about other people. And when he knocks on my door, he usually has a new idea.”

— Shimon Peres

50. “My heart goes out to the brave citizens of Syria, who each day risk and even sacrifice their lives to achieve freedom from a murderous regime. We in Israel welcome the historic struggle to forge democratic, peace-loving governments in our region.”

— Shimon Peres