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Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel Quotes

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Famous Elie Wiesel Quotes

“It was at Auschwitz that human beings underwent their first mutations. Without Auschwitz, there would have been no Hiroshima. Or genocide in Africa. Or attempts to dehumanize man by reducing him to a number, an object: it was at Auschwitz that the methods to be used were conceived, catalogued, and perfected. It was at Auschwitz that men mutilated and gambled with the future. The despair begotten at Auschwitz will linger for generations.”

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Book:One Generation After
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“Sometimes I am asked if I know the response to Auschwitz; I answer that not only do I not know it, but that I don't even know if a tragedy of this magnitude HAS a response. What I do know is that there is response in responsibility. When we speak of this era of evil and darkness, so close and yet so distant, responsibility is the key word, The witness has forced himself to testify. For the youth of today, for the children who will be born tomorrow. He does not want his past to become their future.”

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Book:The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, The Accident
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“In his moments of lucidity, which would later become increasingly rare and painful, he suggested an explanation of what was happening to him: “I am a guilty man. That is why I am being punished like Abuya's heretical sons, I gazed when I should not have gazed and turned my eyes away when I should not have. I saw a sin committed… a crime…I could have, I should have, done something, called out, shouted, struck a blow. I forgot our precepts, our laws, that require an individual to struggle against evil wherever it appears. I forgot that we can never simply remain spectators, we have no right to stand aside, to keep silent, to let the victim fight the aggressor alone. I forgot so many things that day…That is why I am forgetting other things now. Can there be anything worse than that?” Yes, there was worse, there is worse: to forget that one has forgotten.”

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Book:The Forgotten
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“And you don't give a damn for Israel's welfare—admit it! You don't give a damn about their security—go on, admit it! All that matters to you is your scoop, and the boss's congratulations, and if that piece brought you a Pulitzer Prize you jump for joy, and if Israel had to suffer for it, what the hell! Do I overstate the case?” “Yes, you overstate the case, damn right you overstate it! I love my work. I love it passionately, And not because of the rewards but because it's my weapon! I like to think that because of me men and women will be a little happier and their lives a little easier.” “You worry about everybody in the world except your own brothers and sisters in Israel!” “That's a lie!” “Then prove it!” “How do you want me to prove it? By concealing what happens there? By accepting Injustice there and passing over it in silence?” “And the injustices perpetrated against Israel? You don't care about them? The terrorist raids? The assassination of children? The murder of innocent civilians? “The paper we work for talks about them all the time, and often on the front page. Don't you think the Palestinians’ fate deserves a little attention too?” “Ah, there it is—finally admitting it's the Palestinians you care about.” “No. It's the truth I care about. And I love Israel as much as you do.” “But you're prepared to do them harm and put them at risk.” “No! I'm prepared to keep them from doing harm to themselves!” “Oh, magnificent, Tamar! You're going to help Israel in spite of itself! Bravo!”

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Book:The Forgotten
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“I know: even the most eminent doctors are sometimes wrong. I sometimes wonder if the diagnosis is correct. I wonder if my father is suffering from amnesia or some other disease. He may know everything that's happening to him, everything said in his presence, everything going on around him and within him, and he may want to react, to respond, but he may be incapable of it. Or he may not want to. He may be disappointed in mankind. And in its language. He may reject our worn and devalued words. He may need others altogether. And as there are no others, he may be choosing to feign forgetfulness so that he can remain speechless.”

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Book:The Forgotten
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“All my life, until today, I have been content to ask questions. All the while knowing that the real questions, those that concern the creator and his creation, have no answers. I'll go even farther and say that there is a level at which only the questions are eternal, the answers never are. And so, the patient that I am, more charitable, repeats: 'Since God is, He is to be found in the questions as well as in the answers.”

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Book:Open Heart
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“If I had spoken to him out loud, he would have understood the tragic fate of those who came back, left over, living dead. You must look at them carefully. Their appearance is deceptive. They are smugglers. They look like the others. They eat, they laugh, they love. The seek money, fame, love. Like the other. But it isn't true; they are playing, sometimes without even knowing it. Anyone who has seen what THEY have seen cannot be like the others, cannot laugh, love, pray, bargain, suffer, have fun, or forget. Like the others. You have to watch them carefully when they pass by an innocent-looking smokestack, or when they lift a piece of bread to their mouths. Something in them shudders and makes you turn your eyes away. These people have been amputated; they haven't lost their legs or eyes, but their will and their taste for life. The things they have seen will come to the surface again sooner or later. And then the world will be frightened and won't dare look these spiritual cripples in the eye.”

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Book:All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs
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“I admired my father not only for his kindness and intelligence, but also for his memory. He could quote long passages of the Talmud and Plato, the Zohar and the Upanishads. He could recall in rich detail his visit to the ghetto in Stanislav, his first skirmish as a partisan, his arrival in Palestine. He envied the character of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, who remembered what he had done in his mother's womb and even in his father's desire. Immersed in his own past and the world’s, my father was nevertheless a man of his times, reacting to all its convulsions. Politics stimulated him, and so did the international situation. Famine in Africa, racial persecution in Indonesia, religious conflict in Ireland and India: What men did to other men they did to him. When someone said that as a Jew he was wrong to care about anything but Israel, he answered angrily, “God did not create other people so we could turn our backs on them.” And yet he loved Israel with all his heart and soul. Why didn't he go back there to end his days? He did not know, and admitted that to me. “Maybe it's cowardice on my part. Maybe in Jerusalem every stone and every cloud would remind me of your mother; I'd be too unhappy.” Another time he told me, “I know it's convenient to love Israel from a distance. It's even a contradiction, but I'm not afraid of contradictions. In creating man in his own image, didn't God contradict Himself? Except that God is alone and free while man, still alone, is never free.”

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Book:The Forgotten
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“God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, forget not their son who calls upon them now. You well know, You, source of all memory, that to forget is to abandon, to forget is to repudiate. Do not abandon me, God of my fathers, for I've never repudiated You. God of Israel, do not cast out a son of Israel who yearns with all his heart and all his soul to be linked to the history of Israel. God and King of the universe, exile me not from that universe. As a child I learned to revere You, to love You, to obey You; keep me from forgetting the child that I was. As an adolescent I chanted the litanies of the martyrs of Mainz and York; erase them not from my memory, You who erase nothing from Your own. As a man I learned to respect the will of our dead; Keep me from forgetting what I learned. God of my ancestors, let the bond between them and me remain whole, unbroken. You who have chosen to dwell in Jerusalem, let me not forget Jerusalem. You who wander with your people in exile, let me remember them. God of Auschwitz, know that I must remember Auschwitz. And that I must remind you of it. God of Treblinka, let the sound of that name make me, and You, tremble now and always. God of Belzec, let me, and You, weep for the victims of Belzec. You who share are suffering, You who share our weight, let me never be far from those who have invited You into their hearts. You who foresee the future of man, let me not cut myself off from my past. God of justice, be just to me. God of charity, be kind to me. God of mercy, plunge me not into the kaf-ha-kallah, the chasm where all life, hope and light are extinguished by oblivion. God of truth, Remember that without memory truth becomes only the mask of truth. Remember that only memory leads man back to the source of his longing for You. Remember, God of history, that You created man to remember. You put me into the world, You spared me in time of danger and death, That I might testify. What sort of witness would I be without my memory? Know, God, that I do not wish to forget you. I do not wish to forget anything. Not the living and not the dead. Not the voices and not the silences. I do not wish to forget the moments of abundance that enriched my life, nor the hours of anguish that drove me to despair. Even if you forget me, O Lord, I refuse to forget You.”

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Book:The Forgotten
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“Why do you pray?" he asked me, after a moment. Why did I pray? A strange question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe? "I don't know why," I said, even more disturbed and ill at ease. "I don't know why." After that day I saw him often. He explained to me with great insistence that every question possessed a power that did not lie in the answer. "Man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks Him," he was fond of repeating. "That is the true dialogue. Man questions God and God answers. But we don't understand His answers. We can't understand them. Because they come from the depths of the soul, and they stay there until death. You will find the true answers, Eliezer, only within yourself!" "And why do you pray, Moshe?" I asked him. "I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions.”

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Book:Night
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“Malkiel often considered telling his father about her. But Elhanan would have taken it badly. He would have cried “What? You, a Jew, with a Muslim woman? I'm sure she hates Israel….” And indeed she did. Leila, a future follower of the PLO, was already anti-Israel. Between her and Malkiel, argument followed endless and sometimes violent argument. Yes, yes, Israel has suffered, she would say; but does that give them the right to make Palestinians suffer? Malkiel: You know very well it isn't Israel making them suffer! You can blame the Arab governments for their tragedy; why did they exhort them to flee their homes in 1948? And then let them live in refugee camps? Leila: You Jews did all you could to uproot those people and drive them from their land, and now you blame the Arabs? If you hadn't come along, there would have been no tragedy! He: We didn't come along, We came back. Easy enough for you to forget! She: I'm not forgetting anything, but you forget that the Palestinians have been living on that land for centuries, and you abandoned it two thousand years ago! Malkia lost his temper: Abandoned? You dare say we abandoned the land promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? And shown to Moses? And conquered by Joshua? Aren't you ashamed to falsify history? They expelled us from that land, but we never repudiated it, or forgot it, or abandoned it! Since King David there have always been Jews in Jerusalem, and Galilee, and Gaza. She: Oh yes? And the big cities? He: The big cities? Do you mean Haifa, Netanya and Tel Aviv? Do you want to tell me who built them? You, maybe? You were a smattering of people in the desert—do you dare deny that? She: That's the Afrikaner argument in South Africa. He: I forbid you to compare us to those racists and their apartheid! Racism and Judaism are incompatible! We suffered too much from racism to use it against others. She: There you go again with your suffering! As if you were the only people who ever knew hardship!”

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Book:The Forgotten
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“Don't fight it, Tamar. Don't say no just for revenge; no more revenge. No more games. Let's take whatever comes along—the good and the less good alike—simply and in harmony. Despite pain and sorrow, we'll put our trust in what exalts us—my father’s relentless sufferings—and in what thwarts us, too—the ambiguities of life, most of all Jewish life in the diaspora. Will forge new links from which new sparks will rise. Spoken words will become signs, words unspoken will serve as warnings. And we'll invent the rest.”

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Book:The Forgotten
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“Did hope help us to survive, or not? Too many families clung to it all through the war, thus falling into the enemy's trap. But would they have survived without hope? Hope is sometimes unworthy of us, Tamar said, but despair is even worse if it kills the will to act, to confront events, to protest evil, to shout, No! We are not blind, we will not submit! If the absurd exists, we will respond. With reason or with more absurdity—but we'll respond.”

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Book:The Forgotten
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“There's a long road of suffering ahead of you. But don't lose courage. You've already escaped the gravest danger: selection. So now, muster your strength, and don't lose heart. We shall all see the day of liberation. Have faith in life. Above all else, have faith. Drive out despair, and you will keep death away from yourselves. Hell is not for eternity. And now, a prayer - or rather, a piece of advice: let there be comradeship among you. 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.”

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Book:Night
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“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky. Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes. Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.”

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Book:Night
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“Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain. There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred pages are there. Only you don't see them.”

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Author:Elie Wiesel
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“Why had they arrested me? 'Because of a word, perhaps, or a silent grimace,' Razziel Paritus suggested, stroking his beard. 'Or for something your parents were supposed to have done or said. In this country denouncing people is a social duty, a moral imperative, a kind of state religion. It's also possible they arrested you for no reason at all. That your only crime is your innocence.”

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Book:The Judges
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“You can't be serious. Your temple was destroyed two thousand years ago and you're grieving today?” Yes, as if it had happened only yesterday. “A lot of people have told me the Jews were crazy,” she said. “They were right.” Yes, we're crazy. “It's human nature to forget what hurts you, isn't it? Wasn't forgetfulness a gift of the gods to the ancient world? Without it, life would be intolerable, wouldn't it?” Yes, but the Jews live by other rules. For a Jew, nothing is more important than memory. He is bound to his origins by memory. It is memory that connects him to Abraham, Moses and Rabbi Akiba. If he denies memory he will have denied his own honor. “So you insist on keeping all your wounds open?” Those wounds exist; it is therefore forbidden and unhealthy to pretend that they don't.”

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Book:The Forgotten
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“Despite intrigues and feuds, camaraderie on a newspaper was unlike anything else. Anyone’s success was a credit to all. Any victory over injustice, won by reportage or an editorial, justified pride in the whole team. A newspaper was a living organism, pulsating with affection, determined to accept only truth. Of course there was often a gap between the ideal and reality. There were compromises, deals, someone was always passing the buck; all that was normal. But your eyes—at least at the beginning—were on the heights, even if they were unattainable. Even if you had to begin the climb again everyday.”

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Book:The Forgotten
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