Quotes from Francine Klagsbrun

There may be no great honor in running away, but worse than that is continuing like an idiot.

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.

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.

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.

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

Alan Greenspun, a fearless Las Vegas businessman, and a cadre of colorful characters, including such underworld ones as Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One can always push oneself a little bit beyond what only yesterday was thought to be the absolute limit of one's endurance,