Quote collection
533 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"A Jew must be sensitive to the pain of all human beings. A Jew cannot remain indifferent to human suffering... The mission of the Jewish people has never been to make the world more Jewish, but to make it more human."
"I came to the conclusion that I am free to choose my own suffering. But I am not free to consent to someone else's suffering."
"A religious person answers to God, not to the elected or non-elected official."
"All those - or most of those - who went through the experience during the Second World War - they want to remember more - more and more. It's never enough because we feel that we have to tell the story. And no one can tell the story fully."
"Bite your lips, little brother...Don't cry. Keep your anger, your hate, for another day, for later. The day will come but not now...Wait. Clench your teeth and wait."
"The Holocaust is a sacred subject. One should take off one's shoes when entering its domain, one should tremble each time one pronounces the word."
"[Friedrich] Nietzsche said something marvellous, he said "Madness is not a consequence of uncertainty but of certainty", and this is fanaticism."
"I don't want my past to become anyone else's future."
"The opposite of life is not death, it's indifference."
"I think the Messianic concept, which is the Jewish offering to mankind, is a great victory. What does it mean? It means that history has a sense, a meaning, a direction; it goes somewhere, and necessarily in a good direction--the Messiah."
"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."
"Better that 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."
"To forget a Holocaust is to kill twice"
"Because I survived, I must do everything possible to help others."
"The darkest days in my life after the war, after the war, was when I discovered that the ... most of the members and commanders of the Einsatz group that were doing the killings, not even in gas chambers, but killing with machine guns, had college degrees from German universities and PhD's and MD's. Couldn't believe it."
"Whoever survives a test, whatever it may be, must tell the story. That is his duty."
"One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me."
"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."
"They are committing the greatest indignity human beings can inflict on one another: telling people who have suffered excruciating pain and loss that their pain and loss were illusions. (v)"
"God means movement, and not explanation."