Elie Wiesel Quotes

I thought that culture and education are the shield. An educated person cannot do certain things and, and be educated, you cannot, and there they were, killing children day after day.

For me democracy is the only way of life. The opposite is dictatorship or anarchy.

I was convinced that hatred among nations and among people perished in Auschwitz. It didn't. The victims died but the haters are still here.

I think that human beings are capable of the worst things possible and they show that there were times, and there probably are times, that it is human to be inhuman.

I make a difference between genocide and Holocaust. Holocaust was mainly Jewish, that was the only people, to the last Jew, sentenced to die for one reason, for being Jewish, that's all.

You know how many reasons we have to be desperate and despairing, the world is not learning anything. We have seen that.

The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, and so are you.

The more we know, the more pain we have. But because we are human beings, this must be. Otherwise we become objects rather than subjects.

Holy War is a contradiction of terms.

[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.

[Moses] Mendelssohn was a religious Jew. I felt sorry for him.

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.

Love makes everything complicated.

A holy war is a contradiction in terms. War dehumanizes, war diminishes, war debases all those who wage it.

Whether every story that's there [in the Bible] is a historic truth ... Again, I'm not concerned.

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.

A man can laugh while he suffers.

In Jewish tradition the Talmud is said to have been given on Sinai.

I've organised for the last years, since I got the Nobel Prize actually, Anatomy of Hate Conferences all over the world, what is hate. Didn't help but at least they explored it.

The sincere Christian knows that what died in Auschwitz was not the Jewish people but Christianity.

Knowledge does not corrupt, unless it is arrogant; but then it is not true knowledge.

Every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them.

The sins I regret the most are the one's I didn't commit.

There is one right I would not grant anyone. And that is the right to be indifferent.

I describe incidents which may or may not have happened but which are true.

My anger rises up within faith and not outside it.

It was like a page torn from a history book, from some historical novel about the captivity of babylon or Spanish Inquisition.

What do all my books have in common? A commitment to memory.

We still are looking for someone who knows the secret of immortality. Only God is immortal; we are not.

If you ask me what I want to achieve, it's to create an awareness, which is already the beginning of teaching.

There are no accidents, only encounters with destiny!

What I don't like today is, to put it coarsely, the phony Hasidism, the phony mysticism. Many students say, "Teach me mysticism." It's a joke.

It is true that not all the victims were Jews, but all the Jews were victims

Therefore, all my adult life, since I began my life as an author, or as a teacher, I always try to listen to the victim.

My ambition really was, even as a child, to be a writer, a commentator, and a teacher, but a teacher of Talmud.

I spent most of my time talking to God more than to people.

One thing is that [Tibetans] should not give up hope. That's - even [if] it lasts a century. My discussions with the Dalai Lama always were about that.

I believe a human being - if he or she wants to remain human, then he or she must do something with what we have seen, endured, witnessed.

The story [of the Sacrifice of Isaac ] is much more a part of theology than of history.

[The Bible] is been my passion almost from my youth.

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.

What I do, I want to do with all my being.

I respect scholarship. But I don't like to do things half-heartedly.

Except that a human being is both the public and the private. We are both, private and public in the same person.

every question possessed a power that was lost in the answer . . .

Occasionally, I come to moments of anguish in the text.

Josiah has a tremendous reputation in the text. He rediscovered the Book of the Law; you remember how Hilkiah the High Priest somehow found it [2 Kings 22:8].

Abraham is trying to obey God, but not to kill. I feel that moment is one of the defining moments of Jewish faith.

I have a tremendous respect for Professor [Frank Moore] Cross.

Personally, as a student who loves words, who loves texts, I am concerned with finding something in the text from within.