Elie Wiesel quotes - page 3

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. (Elie Wiesel)
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.
Elie Wiesel
For God's sake, where is God?" And from within me, I heard a voice answer: "Where He is? This is where hanging here from this gallows...
Elie Wiesel
The barbed wire that encircled us like a wall did not fill us with real fear. In fact, we felt this was not a bad thing: we were entirely among ourselves. A small Jewish republic...
Elie Wiesel
How are we to reconcile our supreme duty towards memory with the need to forget that is essential to life? No generation has had to confront this paradox with such urgency. The survivors wanted to communicate everything to the living: the victim's solitude and sorrow, the tears of mothers driven to madness, the prayers of the doomed beneath a fiery sky.
Elie Wiesel
It seemed as impossible to conceive of Auschwitz with God as to conceive of Auschwitz without God. Therefore, everything had to be reassessed because everything had changed. With one stroke, mankind's achievements seemed to have been erased. Was Auschwitz a consequence or an aberration of "civilization"? All we know is that Auschwitz called that civilization into question as it called into question everything that had preceded Auschwitz. Scientific abstraction, social and economic contention, nationalism, xenophobia, religious fanaticism, racism, mass hysteria. All found their ultimate expression in Auschwitz.
Elie Wiesel
An SS came toward us wielding a club. He commanded: "Men to the left! Women to the right!" Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight simple, short words. Yet that was the moment when I left my mother. There was no time to think, and I already felt my father's hand press against mine: we were alone.
Elie Wiesel
"The yellow star? So what? It's not lethal..." (Poor Father! Of what then did you die?)
Elie Wiesel
I had anger but never hate. Before the war, I was too busy studying to hate. After the war, I thought, What's the use? To hate would be to reduce myself.
Elie Wiesel
"Yisgadal, veyiskadash, shmey raba...May His name be celebrated and sanctified..." whispered my father. For the first time, I felt anger rising within me. Why should I sanctify His name? The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent. What was there to thank Him for?
Elie Wiesel
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest. (Elie Wiesel)
To remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all.
Elie Wiesel
One person of integrity can make a difference.
Elie Wiesel
Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life.
Elie Wiesel
To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.
Elie Wiesel
Even in darkness it is possible to create light and encourage compassion. That it is possible to feel free inside a prison. That even in exile, friendship exists and can become an anchor. That one instant before dying, man is still immortal.
Elie Wiesel
Once you bring life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world.
Elie Wiesel
Which is better, truth that is a lie or the lie that is truth?
Elie Wiesel
To forget a Holocaust is to kill twice.
Elie Wiesel
When you listen to a witness, you become a witness.
Elie Wiesel
Whoever survives a test, whatever it may be, must tell the story. That is his duty. (Elie Wiesel)
We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.
Elie Wiesel
I decided to devote my life to telling the story because I felt that having survived I owe something to the dead. and anyone who does not remember betrays them again.
Elie Wiesel
Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.
Elie Wiesel
Only fanatics - in religion as well as in politics - can find a meaning in someone else's death.
Elie Wiesel