Abba Eban Quotes

29 quotes in 388 categories

• A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually.
• His ignorance is encyclopedic.
• Playing the game I have learned the meaning of humility. It has given me an understanding of futility of the human effort.
• A nation writes its history in the image of its ideal.
• Our intention to regard the closing of the Straits as a casus belli was communicated...to the foreign ministers of those states which had supported international…
• It is our experience that political leaders do not always mean the opposite of what they say.
• Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
• Nobody does Israel any service by proclaiming its 'right to exist.' Israel's right to exist, like that of the United States, Saudi Arabia and 152…
• Tragedy is not what men suffer but what they miss.
• Tragedy is the difference between what is and what could have been.
• Lest Arab governments be tempted out of sheer routine to rush into impulsive rejection, let me suggest that tragedy is not what men suffer but…
• I think that this is the first war in history that on the morrow the victors sued for peace and the vanquished called for unconditional…
• Zionism is nothing more, but also nothing less, than the Jewish People's sense of origin and destination in the Land linked eternally with its name.…
• Salvation, the prophets tell us, is preconditioned by repentance. The redeeming act of God waits upon man's initiative.
• It [idolatry] nourishes mans ambition to domineer over his fellow man. Idolatry, therefore, is the source of all social and moral evil in the world.
• Better to be disliked than pitied.
• Human beings act intelligently only after they have exhausted the alternatives
• If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164…
• History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
• One of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a…

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