"You know how many reasons we have to be desperate and despairing, the world is not learning anything. We have seen that."
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Quote collection
Elie Wiesel quotes (page 19 of 27)
533 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Fanaticism is the greatest threat today. Literally, the 21st century threatened by fanatics, and we have fanatics in every religion, unfortunately, and what can we do against them? Words nothing else, I'm against violence but only words."
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"I cannot cure everybody. I cannot help everybody. But to tell the lonely person that I am not far or different from that lonely person, that I am with him or her, that's all I think we can do and we should do."
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"Usually I get up early every morning and from 6:00 to 10:00 I write. The rest of the time I study and prepare my work or I do other things. But four hours a day are exclusively devoted to writing."
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"Whether every story that's there [in the Bible] is a historic truth ... Again, I'm not concerned."
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"A holy war is a contradiction in terms. War dehumanizes, war diminishes, war debases all those who wage it."
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"If there is one person on the planet who still is suffering from loneliness and from pain or despair, and we don't know about it, or we don't want to know about it, then something is wrong with the world."
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"Love makes everything complicated."
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"We're alone, but we are capable of communicating to one another both our loneliness and our desire to break through it. You say, 'I'm alone.' Someone answers, 'I'm alone too.' There's a shift in the scale of power. A bridge is thrown between the two abysses."
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"In spite of despair, hope must exist. In spite of suffering, humanity must prevail. And in spite of all the differences in the world, the worst enemy, the worst peril, is indifference."
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"[Moses] Mendelssohn was a religious Jew. I felt sorry for him."
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"The Pope going to Jerusalem, the Pope recognising the State of Islam, the Pope going to the wall organising a concert for the Holocaust in the Vatican, going to the synagogue in Vatican, and that happens in Protestant service as well. That doesn't mean that anti-Semitism disappear, but it is on certain level that Jews all the time, or with Christians, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, meeting all the time, studying together, signing petitions for all kinds of causes."
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"[Shirat ha-Yam ] is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, pieces of Biblical literature that we possess. It is much closer to history than later traditions of the Exodus."
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"If the victims are my problem, the killers are yours."
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"When I began teaching you hardly could find a university in America or a college where they would teach either Jewish studies or Holocaust studies."
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"But because of his telling, many who did not believe have come to believe, and some who did not care have come to care. He tells the story, out of infinite pain, partly to honor the dead, but also to warn the living - to warn the living that it could happen again and that it must never happen again. Better than one heart be broken a thousand times in the retelling, he has decided, if it means that a thousand other hearts need not be broken at all. (vi)"
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"[The Bible] is been my passion almost from my youth."
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"I do not deal with the text [of the Bible] scientifically. I read it, I'm interested in its layers of meaning, but my relation to it is much more an emotional one."
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"Except that a human being is both the public and the private. We are both, private and public in the same person."
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"every question possessed a power that was lost in the answer . . ."
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