Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.
Elie Wiesel
We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
Mankind must remember that peace is not God's gift to his creatures; peace is our gift to each other.
Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.
Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.
For me, every hour is grace. And I feel gratitude in my heart each time I can meet someone and look at his or her smile.
Once you bring life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world.
Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe.
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.
When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity. A person can almost be defined by his or her attitude toward gratitude.
Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.
It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.
Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.
There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win.
When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.
Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only we can give one another.
Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.
A destruction, an annihilation that only man can provoke, only man can prevent.
I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I've been closer to him for that reason.
Peace is our gift to each other.
Some stories are true that never happened.
Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.
Someone who hates one group will end up hating everyone - and, ultimately, hating himself or herself.
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.
I was very, very religious. And of course I wrote about it in 'Night.' I questioned God's silence. So I questioned. I don't have an answer for that. Does it mean that I stopped having faith? No. I have faith, but I question it.
When language fails, violence becomes a language; I never had that feeling.
In any society, fanatics who hate don't hate only me - they hate you, too. They hate everybody.
I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory.
Most people think that shadows follow, precede or surround beings or objects. The truth is that they also surround words, ideas, desires, deeds, impulses and memories.
For me, every hour is grace.
Look, if I were alone in the world, I would have the right to choose despair, solitude and self-fulfillment. But I am not alone.
Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life.
That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life - that is what is abnormal.
I write to understand as much as to be understood.
In the concentration camps, we discovered this whole universe where everyone had his place. The killer came to kill, and the victims came to die.
After all, God is God because he remembers.
Human beings should be held accountable. Leave God alone. He has enough problems.
We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else.
No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.
There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them.
Language failed me very often, but then, the substitute for me was silence, but not violence.
Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.
I don't know much about politics, and I don't want to know. That's why I rarely involve myself in politics.
My greatest disappointment is that I believe that those of us who went through the war and tried to write about it, about their experience, became messengers. We have given the message, and nothing changed.
In Jewish history there are no coincidences.
It's clear to me that one can't be Jewish without Israel. Religious or non-religious, Zionist or non-Zionist, Ashkenazi or Sephardic - all these will not exist without Israel.
Man, as long as he lives, is immortal. One minute before his death he shall be immortal. But one minute later, God wins.
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.
