Israel is not an aviary.
ABBA EBANA statesman who keeps his ear permanently glued to the ground will have neither elegance of posture nor flexibility of movement.
More Abba Eban Quotes
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It is our experience that political leaders do not always mean the opposite of what they say.
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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 what they miss.
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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 other states, is axiomatic and unreserved.
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Salvation, the prophets tell us, is preconditioned by repentance. The redeeming act of God waits upon man’s initiative.
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Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
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His ignorance is encyclopedic.
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Science is not a sacred cow. Science is a horse. Don’t worship it. Feed it. [Addressing a group of prospective contributors to an Israeli scientific research program]
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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 navigation in the Straits in 1957 and thereafter.
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Playing the game I have learned the meaning of humility. It has given me an understanding of futility of the human effort.
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A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually.
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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.
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Human beings act intelligently only after they have exhausted the alternatives
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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.
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A nation writes its history in the image of its ideal.
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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 distinction at all.
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