Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel KBE (September 30, 1928 – July 2, 2016) was an American Romanian-born Jewish writer, professor, political activist, Holocaust survivor, and Nobel Laureate. He was the author of 57 books, written mostly in French and English, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a prisoner in the Auschwitz, Buna, and Buchenwald concentration camps. Wiesel was also the Advisory Board chairman of the newspaper Algemeiner Journal. He was the Andrew Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Boston University, in Boston, Massachusetts. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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A destruction only man can provoke, only man can prevent. Mankind must remember that peace is not God's gift to his creatures, it is our gift to each other.
An immoral society betrays humanity because it betrays the basis for humanity, which is memory.
Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.
Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.
I believe that all the survivors are mad. One time or another their madness will explode. You cannot absorb that much madness and not be influenced by it.
I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.
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.
I rarely speak about God. To God, yes. I protest against Him. I shout at Him. But to open a discourse about the qualities of God, about the problems that God imposes, theodicy, no. And yet He is there, in silence, in filigree.
Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.
Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.
Man, as long as he lives, is immortal. One minute before his death he shall be immortal. But one minute later, God wins.
Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking and loving and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day takes on a new and deeper meaning.
No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.
Nobody is stronger, nobody is weaker than someone who came back. There is nothing you can do to such a person because whatever you could do is less than what has already been done to him. We have already paid the price.
None of us is in a position to eliminate war, but it is our obligation to denounce it and expose it in all its hideousness. War leaves no victors, only victims.
Once you bring life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world.
Remember that despair is never the solution. Remember, hatred is never an option. Remember that hope is not a gift given to us, hope is a gift that we give to others.
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, but indifference between life and death.
There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win.
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 re sult of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them.
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
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.
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.
We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
What does mysticism really mean? It means the way to attain knowledge. It's close to philosophy, except in philosophy you go horizontally while in mysticism you go vertically.
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.
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 the abyss.
Whenever an angel says 'Be not afraid!' you'd better start worrying. A big assignment is on the way.
Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.
Categories: Elie Wiesel, Quotes of the day
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