Elie Wiesel
All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them. No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior.Collection: Faith
Education in the key to preventing the cycle of violence and hatred that marred the 20th century from repeating itself in the 21st century.Collection: Education
I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.Collection: Bystanders
Always remember, my good friends, that there is one sin we must never commit and it is to humiliate another person or to allow another person to be humiliated in our presence without us screaming and shouting and protesting.Collection: Good Friend
Philosophy is a slow process of logic and logical discourse: A bringing B bringing C and so forth. In mysticism you can jump from A to Z. But the ultimate objective is the same. It's knowledge. It's truth.Collection: Philosophy
All those - or most of those - who went through the experience during the Second World War - they want to remember more - more and more. It's never enough because we feel that we have to tell the story. And no one can tell the story fully.Collection: War
My faith is a wounded faith, but it's not without faith. My life is not without faith.Collection: Life Is
How can one explain the attraction terror holds for some minds — and why for intellectuals? . . .In a totalitarian and terrorist regime, man is no longer a unique being with infinite possibilities and limitless choices but a number, a puppet, with just this difference — numbers and puppets are not susceptible to fear.Collection: Men
Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love.Collection: Friendship
Hunger is isolating; it may not and cannot be experienced vicariously. He who never felt hunger can never know its real effects, both tangible and intangible. Hunger defies imagination; it even defies memory. Hunger is felt only in the present.Collection: Memories
There is divine beauty in learning... To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps.Collection: Education
One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.Collection: Wall
I've been fighting my entire adult life for men and women everywhere to be equal and to be different. But there is one right I would not grant anyone. And that is the right to be indifferent.Collection: Fighting
You shouldn’t act as a spokesperson for someone who’s trying to impose his will on you.Collection: Trying
I don't know the real answer, my answer to anything which is essentially human relations is education. Whatever the answer is, education must be its measured component and if you try to educate with generosity not with triumphalism I think sometimes it works, especially young people, that's why I teach, I've been teaching all my life.Collection: Real
I believe in books. And when our people [coughing] - our people of Jerusalem, let's say after the Romans destroyed the temple and the city, all we took is a little book, that's all. Not treasures, we had no treasures. They were ransacked, taken away. But the book - the little book - and this book produced more books, thousands, hundreds of thousands of books, and in the book we found our memory, and our attachment to that memory is what kept us alive.Collection: Memories
Memory feeds a culture, nourishes hope and makes a human, human.Collection: Memories
Certain things, certain events, seem inexplicable only for a time: up to the moment when the veil is torn aside.Collection: Events
When adults wage war, children perish.Collection: Children
For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.Collection: War
Perhaps some day someone will explain how, on the level of man, Auschwitz was possible; but on the level of God, it will forever remain the most disturbing of mysteries.Collection: Men
When has religion ever been unifying? Religion has introduced many wars in this world, enough bloodshed and violence.Collection: Religious
It is by his freedom that a man knows himself, by his sovereignty over his own life that a man measures himself.Collection: Freedom
What would the future of man be if it were devoid of memory?Collection: Memories
'Indifference to evil is equal to evil' because it strengthens people.Collection: People
His cold eyes stared at me. At last, he said wearily: "I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.Collection: Eye
War is like night, she said. It covers everything.Collection: War
Mankind needs peace more than ever, for our entire planet, threatened by nuclear war, is in danger of total destruction. A destruction only man can provoke, only man can prevent.Collection: Peace
It is up to us to determine whether the years ahead will be for humankind a curse or a blessing. We always must remember that it is given to men and women to choose life and living, not death and destruction.Collection: Blessing
I have absolutely no problem with the young Germans. I even feel sorry for the young Germans because to be maybe sons or daughters of killers is different than them to be sons and daughters of the victims. And I felt sorry for them. I still do.Collection: Daughter
The opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.Collection: Opposites
If there is a single theme that dominates all my writings, all my obsessions, it is that of memory-because I fear forgetfulness as much as hatred and death.Collection: Memories
Music does not replace words, it gives tone to the wordsCollection: Music
It is obvious that the war which Hitler and his accomplices waged was a war not only against Jewish men, women, and children, but also against Jewish religion, Jewish culture, Jewish tradition, therefore Jewish memory.Collection: Children
The Jewish tradition of learning-is learning. Adam chose knowledge instead of immortality.Collection: Learning
The term is piqua nevish [?] it means to save a soul, to save a life. And that commandment supersedes all others. It means literally you may violate almost everything except, I think, three commandments of the heart, 613, - you may do anything, violate any commandment and the injunction simply to save a human life. And there are enough lives to be saved in - in Tibet.Collection: Heart
We still are looking for someone who knows the secret of immortality. Only God is immortal; we are not.Collection: Secret
I don't believe in collective guilt. The children of killers are not killers, but children.Collection: Children
I spent most of my time talking to God more than to people.Collection: God
Why is war such an easy option? Why does peace remain such an elusive goal? We know statesmen skilled at waging war, but where are those dedicated enough to humanity to find a way to avoid warCollection: War
I want to go back to the child I used to be, and to read with the same naiveté [the Pentateuch]. I want to leave science aside and go back to the pure perception offered to me in the text that is waiting there for me year after year.Collection: Children
Warmed-over loves and soups are generally not recommended.Collection: Soup
When our center is strong, everything else is secondary.Collection: Strong
Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.Collection: Children
I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions.Collection: Giving
If enough people are sensitive to the tragedy of Tibet, I think it will produce a change politically as well. But furthermore, it's important for the people in Tibet. Now communication is such [that] people know what is happening. Even Tibetan people would know that the Interfaith or the international group of religious people - that everybody who is religious is taking up their cause. It would help them a lot if we give them courage, and that in itself is enough.Collection: Religious
I am not so naïve as to believe that this slim volume will change the course of history or shake the conscience of the world. Books no longer have the power they once did. Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow.Collection: Believe
We must choose between the violence of adults and the smiles of children.Collection: Children
Writers write because they cannot allow the characters that inhabit them to suffocate them. These characters want to get out, to breathe fresh air and partake of the wine of friendship; were they to remain locked in, they would forcibly break down the walls. It is they who force the writer to tell their stories.Collection: Wall