Elie Wiesel

After all, God is God because he remembers.

Language failed me very often, but then, the substitute for me was silence, but not violence.

Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.

Peace is our gift to each other.

I don't like docudramas. Documentaries should not go together with fiction, or half-fiction or quarter-fiction. The two should not go together. They cannot mix.

Moses was the greatest legislator and the commander in chief of perhaps the first liberation army.

That is my major preoccupation, memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.

We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

I write to understand as much as to be understood.

I will say, with memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful.

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.

I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I've been closer to him for that reason.

For in my tradition, as a Jew, I believe that whatever we receive we must share.

Someone who hates one group will end up hating everyone and ultimately hating himself or herself.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.

When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.

The Bible is not only laws, it's also stories.

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.

Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.

Historically, I come from Jewish history. I had the classic upbringing in the Yeshiva, learning, learning, and more learning.

Some stories are true that never happened.

I don't know much about politics, and I don't want to know. That's why I rarely involve myself in politics.

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.

If I were immersed in constant melancholy, I would not be who I am.

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.

I've given my life to the principle and the ideal of memory, and remembrance.

What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor but the silence of the bystander.

Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life.

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.

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession friendship is never anything but sharing.

There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes even if you lose you win.

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.

Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.

Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

The deeper the nostalgia and the more complete the fear, the purer, the richer the word and the secret.

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.

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.

I'm a teacher and a writer; my life is words. When I see the denigration of language, it hurts me, and it's easy to denigrate a word by trivializing it.

Waking among the dead, one wondered if one was still alive. And yet real despair only seized us later. Afterwards. As we emerged from the nightmare and began to search for meaning.

In Jewish history there are no coincidences.

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.

An indifference to suffering makes humans inhuman.

I would like to see real peace and a state of Israel living peacefully alongside a state of Palestine.

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.

I'll tell you what: I believe mysticism is a very serious endeavor. One must be equipped for it.

A destruction an annihilation that only man can provoke only man can prevent.

Someone who hates one group will end up hating everyone - and, ultimately, hating himself or herself.

Mankind must remember that peace is not God's gift to his creatures; peace is our gift to each other.

There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win.

No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them

We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else.

If I were in the government, I would persuade the prime minister to see the beauty in the fact that people see Israel as a haven - from their sadness to their hope.

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

In any society, fanatics who hate don't hate only me - they hate you, too. They hate everybody.

When did I learn the Bible? When I was four or five years old. It's still the pull of my childhood, a fascination with the vanished world, and I can find everything except that world.

Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.

When I was young I lost everything.

Now, when I hear that Christians are getting together in order to defend the people of Israel, of course it brings joy to my heart. And it simply says, look, people have learned from history.

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.

What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor, but the silence of the bystander.

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.

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.

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.

I have to be self-conscious of what I'm trying to do with my life.

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor never the tormented.

Terrorism must be outlawed by all civilized nations, not explained or rationalized, but fought and eradicated. Nothing can, nothing will justify the murder of innocent people and helpless children.

Every question possessed a power that did not lie in the answer.

I wanted to write a commentary on the Bible, to write about the Talmud, about celebration, about the great eternal subjects: love and happiness.

The impact of the holocaust on believers as well as unbelievers, on Jews as well as Christians, has not yet been evaluated. Not deeply, not enough.

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.

Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only we can give one another.

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.

Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.

I do not recall a Jewish home without a book on the table.

It used to be said that when the Baal Shem Tov came into a town, his impact was so strong, he didn't have to speak. His disciples had to dance or to sing or to preach to have the same effect. I think a real messenger, myself or anyone, by the very fact that he is there as a person, as a symbol, could have the same impact.

Once you bring life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world.

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession friendship is never anything but sharing

In my tradition, one must wait until one has learned a lot of Bible and Talmud and the Prophets to handle mysticism. This isn't instant coffee. There is no instant mysticism.

Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.

Indifference is the sign of sickness, a sickness of the soul more contagious than any other.

I remember, May 1944: I was 15-and-a-half, and I was thrown into a haunted universe where the story of the human adventure seemed to swing irrevocably between horror and malediction.

When language fails, violence becomes a language; I never had that feeling.

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.

Man, as long as he lives, is immortal. One minute before his death he shall be immortal. But one minute later, God wins.

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.

I never teach the same course twice.

Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.

No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.

Human beings should be held accountable. Leave God alone. He has enough problems.

Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.

A destruction, an annihilation that only man can provoke, only man can prevent.

For me, every hour is grace.

I believe in superstitions. You don't talk about a child who hasn't been born.

The only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.