Мене завжди цікавила історія Ізраїлю, і книга Шімона Переса була одною з тих, яку я хотіла прочитати. Багато історій і цитат якраз дуже перекликаються з теперішніми часами. Публікую тут ці цитати, вони дуже потужні. А також весь текст з епілогу, його можна читати кожного дня зранку, щоб потім цілий день створювати щось хороше в цьому світі.
Quotes from Shimon Peres book “No room for small dreams”:
“If an expert says it can’t be done, get another expert.”
“it’s not enough to be up to date. We have to be up “to-morrow.”
“It was not me that changed; it was the situation that changed.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“When Israel was weak, I worked to make her fierce. But once she was strong, I gave my life’s efforts to peace.”
“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.”
“Given the thin line between success and failure, knowing that what works in one circumstance might be disastrous in another, what do such operations have to teach us? It’s certainly not that daring military action is or isn’t the better course; it’s that daring thinking about one’s options is always the better course.”
“During my career, I would encounter numerous situations in which parties found themselves full of mistrust and anger, where it seemed that all doors had been closed. Ben-Gurion had shown me that listening is not just a key element of good leadership, it is the key, the means to unlock doors that have been slammed shut by bitter dispute and resignation.”
“tell them that both optimists and pessimists die in the end, but the optimist leads a hopeful and happy existence while the pessimist spends his days cynical and downtrodden. It is too high a price to pay. Besides, optimism is a prerequisite of progress. It provides the inspiration we need, especially in hard times.”