Peoplehood Quotes

A Volk [people] without a state is nothing, a lifelong frivolous phantom like the vagabond gypsies and Jews.

We rise and fall as one people, one nation.

To be a Jew, essentially and not just accidentally, is to regard the Jewish people as one's sole primal community. Election by the unique God requires total and unconditional loyalty to one people.

If a country forgets where it came from, how will its people know who they are?

The Land of Israel needs a People and the People of Israel needs a Land.

The laws of Solon, of Numa of Lycurgus are dead while the even older laws of Moses still live. Athens, Sparta, Rome have perished and have left no children on earth. Zion, while destroyed did not lose its children;;; They no longer have leaders and yet they are a people, they no longer have a country and yet they are citizens.

Judaism is not just a religion but a people, and the food and customs of one part of the people is connected to the other part of the people. They are part of a larger story.

You see, gentlemen, they have something to die for. They've discovered they're a people. They're awakening.

Working with the Jewish community is essential to me and what I stand for. I do explicitly see Jewish people as a people - not either a religion or an ethnicity but a people. The Tories take Jewish London for granted. I will not.

I decided that we should have a flag, that a flag fit us as a symbol, that we are a people, a tribe if you will. And flags are about proclaiming power, so it's very appropriate.

[He] understood the people in a new way...The people is not everyone who speaks our language, nor yet the elect marked by the fiery stamp of genius. Not by birth, not by the work of one's hands, not by the wings of education is one elected into the people. But by one's inner self. Everyone forges his inner self year after year. One must try to temper, to cut, to polish one's soul so as to become a human being. And thereby become a tiny particle of one's own people.

Each of us has been designed for one of two immortal functions, as either a storyteller or as a cross-legged listener to tales of wonder, love, and daring. When we cease to tell or listen, then we no longer exist as a people.

We are a people in search of community.

A first difficulty of the Arab movement was to say who the Arabs were. Being a manufactured people, their name had been changing in sense slowly year by year. Once it meant an Arabian. There was a country called Arabia; but this was nothing to the point.

Ours is a country built more on people than on territory. The Jews will come from everywhere: from France, from Russia, from America, from Yemen... Their faith is their passport.

I do explicitly see Jewish people as a people - not either a religion or an ethnicity but a people.

Peoplehood tends to develop into nationhood if the people achieves a certain maturity. This is analogous to an individual person who becomes acquainted with herself only in the course of her life, without being able to say that she possessed no personal uniqueness at all before that 'self-recognition.'

He was part of a whole, a people scattered over the earth and yet eternally one and indivisible. Wherever a Jew lived, in whatever safety and isolation, he still belonged to his people.

We're seeking sovereignty because it is absolutely essential, like the ripening of the fruit, like reaching adulthood, like the opening of river into the ocean. It is necessary because we are a people.

Races didn't bother the Americans. They were something a lot better than any race. They were a People. They were the first self-constituted, self-declared, self-created People in the history of the world.

To have common glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have done great things together, to will to do the like again, — such are the essential conditions for the making of a people.