Lioness Quotes

“There may be no great honor in running away, but worse than that is continuing like an idiot.”
― Francine Klagsbrun, Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel

“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.”
― Francine Klagsbrun, Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel

“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.”
― Francine Klagsbrun, Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel

“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.”
― Francine Klagsbrun, Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel

“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.”
― Francine Klagsbrun, Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel

“One can always push oneself a little bit beyond what only yesterday was thought to be the absolute limit of one’s endurance,”
― Francine Klagsbrun, Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel

“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.”
― Francine Klagsbrun, Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel

“Bedouin”
― Francine Klagsbrun, Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel

“Israeli”
― Francine Klagsbrun, Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel

“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.”
― Francine Klagsbrun, Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel

“They are ready to sell us out as they have the Chechs [sic],” an allusion to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in the Munich Agreement, forcing Czechoslovakia to cede its industrially rich Sudetenland to Germany.”
― Francine Klagsbrun, Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel

“Uninvited, they had come from Nazi Germany as observers. When they returned to Berlin, they informed Hitler that he could do whatever he wished with the Jews. No nation would stop him.”
― Francine Klagsbrun, Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel

“I realized then,” she told a young journalist, “that a world which is not necessarily anti-Semitic—because Hitler was denounced at the conference and there was considerable pro-Jewish sentiment—could stand by and see others who were weaker victimized…We can’t depend on any others.”
― Francine Klagsbrun, Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel

“There is only one thing I hope to see before I die, and that is that my people should not need expressions of sympathy anymore.”
― Francine Klagsbrun, Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel

“Everybody expresses sympathy for us, but the situation is still tragic,” she said. “Even if there truly is a desire at this conference to solve the Jewish problem, it stems from a feeling of ‘cast them away from before my eyes,’ ” an allusion to Pharaoh’s words to Moses in the Hebrew Bible. “They want to push the Jews into a distant corner,” she continued, “so that they won’t be an obstacle and won’t need to be spoken about any longer. But we in Eretz Israel are creating not a corner for hiding but a homeland.”
― Francine Klagsbrun, Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel

“Alan Greenspun, a fearless Las Vegas businessman, and a cadre of colorful characters, including such underworld ones as Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky.”
― Francine Klagsbrun, Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel

“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”
― Francine Klagsbrun, Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel