Elie Wiesel
Each man was his own executioner and his own victim.Collection: Men
Weapons means killing. Weapons is ah, I'm simply sensitive to the word.Collection: Mean
I come from a tradition - from the Jewish tradition, which believes in words, in language, in communication.Collection: Believe
[Chinese] are a huge empire now, you'll soon be - in a few years two billion people in the world. So, you should be more compassionate, more understanding. And above all, you don't need all their trouble.Collection: Two
I would say to [Chinese government], You don't need Tibet really. You don't need all the problems Tibet creates for you. It's so small, so far away. Give them their religious freedom and I know that they wouldn't misuse it.Collection: Religious
The whole community must be saved [in Tibet].Collection: Community
But the forces of evil have not abdicated. The malevolent ghosts of hatred are resurgent with a fury and a boldness that are as astounding as they are nauseating: ethnic conflicts, religious riots, anti-Semitic incidents here, there, and everywhere. What is wrong with these morally degenerate people that they abuse their freedom, so recently won?Collection: Religious
The story [of the Sacrifice of Isaac ] is much more a part of theology than of history.Collection: Sacrifice
It always hurts when you lose a secret.Collection: Hurt
Except if it has some historical meaning for them to have Tibet under their control. I don't understand why [ Chinese] want it so much.Collection: Historical
What do all my books have in common? A commitment to memory.Collection: Memories
I feel very close to French culture and to the French humanism, which occasionally one finds, even in the highest places. And therefore, all of my books have been written in French.Collection: Book
If God exists, how can we lay claim to freedom, since He is its beginning and its end?Collection: Freedom
We are heading towards catastrophe. I think the world is going to pieces. I am very pessimistic. Why? Because the world hasn't been punished yet, and the only punishment that could be adequate is the nuclear destruction of the world.Collection: Thinking
It has become increasingly clear that Hungarian authorities are encouraging the whitewashing of tragic and criminal episodes in Hungary's past, namely the wartime Hungarian governments' involvement in the deportation and murder of hundreds of thousands of its Jewish citizens. I found it outrageous that the Speaker of the Hungarian National Assembly could participate in a ceremony honoring a Hungarian fascist ideologueCollection: Past
I believe a human being - if he or she wants to remain human, then he or she must do something with what we have seen, endured, witnessed.Collection: Believe
When you see the abyss, and we have looked into it, then what? There isn't much room at the edge -- one person, another, not many. If you are there, others cannot be there. If you are there, you become a protective wall. What happens? You become part of tCollection: Wall
Paris: city of encounters, of furtive and painful discoveries. All isms converge there, including the anti-isms, all the revolutionaries too, including the counterrevolutionaries .Collection: Discovery
I would not like to draw analogies, with the past.Governments, leaders, intellectuals, mainly intellectuals who should know the ethical dimensions, are so important, so essential to culture, religion, to civilization, and to our own lives. And that means what? It means not to be indifferent, not to stand idly by. That is a biblical commandment that we are committed.Collection: Mean
What I don't like today is, to put it coarsely, the phony Hasidism, the phony mysticism. Many students say, "Teach me mysticism." It's a joke.Collection: Today
Naturally, the human being wants to forget pain.Collection: Pain
When I see a child who is hungry, I see a person who is humiliated.Collection: Children
When I see what is happening all over the world today - the violence - the stupid, arrogant, grotesque violence that is dominating humankind. I cannot not remember that there were other times, of course [the Second World War]. I never compare.Collection: War
I would hesitate to give advice to the Dalai Lama and his people because they are suffering. The Dalai Lama suffered from exile and the people in Tibet suffer from oppression.Collection: People
From time immemorial, people have talked about peace without achieving it. Do we simply lack enough experience? Though we talk peace, we wage war. Sometimes we even wage war in the name of peace. . . . War may be too much a part of history to be eliminated—ever.Collection: War
Granted that every war is madness-civil war, fratricide, is the worst of all; it reaches deeper into ugliness, cruelty and absurdity.Collection: War
Though we talk peace, we wage war. Sometimes we even wage war in the name of peace. Does that seem paradoxical? Well, war is not afraid of paradoxes.Collection: War
The act of writing is for me often nothing more than the secret or conscious desire to carve words on a tombstone: to the memory of a town forever vanished, to the memory of a childhood in exile, to the memory of all those I loved and who, before I could tell them I loved them, went away.Collection: Memories
The opposite of faith is not heresy but indifferenceCollection: Opposites
All those who love thrillers will find in Michael Alexiades's first novel a source of great pleasure and satisfaction. It combines suspense and knowledge, experience and imagination. His grateful readers will now wait for the next.Collection: Grateful
And action is the only remedy to indifference, the most insidious danger of all.Collection: Action
I was never without a book in my hand.Collection: Book
I wrote my first book, I published it in 1955, it was in Yiddish and it was called And The World Was Silent.Collection: Book
Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow.Collection: Yesterday
We are all brothers and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive. (pg. 39)Collection: Brother
There is a coalition of anti-Semitism today, the extreme left, the extreme right and in the middle the huge corpus of Islam. I'm worried, I go around with a very heavy heart.Collection: Heart
I don't see the junk youth. I only meet students, and even those who are not formally at the university, if they come to listen to me, they come to read me, it means they are not junk students.Collection: Mean
When I began teaching you hardly could find a university in America or a college where they would teach either Jewish studies or Holocaust studies.Collection: Teaching
Today there isn't a university where they don't have special courses [Jewish studies or Holocaust studies], hundreds and hundreds of universities, young people today want to know more than their elders did, much more, and therefore I am very optimistic about young people.Collection: Optimistic
The American and the British armies liberated camps, there wasn't a single order of the day: Let's go and liberate the camp. They stumbled upon the camps. Same thing with the Russians, I asked the Colonel who liberated Auschwitz, they didn't, there wasn't a priority. But I feel that that was a mistake, it was a sin because they could have saved so many people and they didn't.Collection: Mistake
We were masters of nature, masters of the world. We had forgotten everything--death, fatigue, our natural needs. Stronger than cold or hunger, stronger than the shots and the desire to die, condemned and wandering, mere numbers, we were the only men on earth.Collection: Night
Everybody around us was weeping. Someone began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don't know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves.Collection: Prayer
I do not deal with the text [of the Bible] scientifically. I read it, I'm interested in its layers of meaning, but my relation to it is much more an emotional one.Collection: Emotional
I really don't teach the way Professor [Frank Moore] Cross does. I don't teach the text the same way he does. I teach Biblical themes, Biblical events.Collection: Biblical
I have one request: may I never use my reason against truth.Collection: Education
Memory is the keyword which combines past with present, past and future.Collection: Memories
Only one enemy is worse than despair: indifference. In every area of human creativity, indifference is the enemy; indifference of evil is worse than evil, because it is also sterile.Collection: Creativity
I was inspired by the marvelous example of Giacometti, the great sculptor. He always said that his dream was to do a bust so small that it could enter a matchbook, but so heavy that no one could lift it. That's what a good book should be.Collection: Dream
The darkness enveloped us. All I could hear was the violin and it was as if Juliek's soul had become the bow. He was playing his life...He played that which he would never play again.Collection: Play