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Elie Wiesel Quotes
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Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel KBE was a Romanian-born American Jewish writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor. 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 and Buchenwald concentration camps.

Along with writing, he was a professor of the humanities at Boston University, which created the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies in his honor. He was involved with Jewish causes, and helped establish the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In his political activities he also campaigned for victims of oppression in places like South Africa and Nicaragua and genocide in Sudan. He publicly condemned the 1915 Armenian Genocide and remained a strong defender of human rights during his lifetime. He was described as "the most important Jew in America" by the Los Angeles Times.

Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, at which time the Norwegian Nobel Committee called him a "messenger to mankind," stating that through his struggle to come to terms with "his own personal experience of total humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in Hitler's death camps", as well as his "practical work in the cause of peace", Wiesel had delivered a message "of peace, atonement and human dignity" to humanity. He was a founding board member of the New York Human Rights Foundation and remained active throughout his life.

✵ 30. September 1928 – 2. July 2016
Elie Wiesel photo
Elie Wiesel: 155 quotes12 likes

Elie Wiesel Quotes

“Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Source: Night

“Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to life as long as God himself”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Source: Night

“The stars were only sparks of the fire which devoured us. Should that fire die out one day, there would be nothing left in the sky but dead stars, dead eyes.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Source: Night

“Some stories are true that never happened.”

Elie Wiesel

“Everybody around us was weeping. Someone began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don't know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Source: Night

“The world? The world is not interested in us. Today, everything is possible, even the crematoria…”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Source: Night (1960)

“Not all games are innocent. Some come dangerously close to cruelty.”

Elie Wiesel

Source: The Judges

“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…”

Elie Wiesel

“Suffering pulls us farther away from other human beings. It builds a wall made of cries and contempt to separate us.”

Elie Wiesel book Day

Source: Day

“every question possessed a power that was lost in the answer…”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Variant: He explained to me with great insistence that every question posessed a power that did not lie in the answer.
Source: Night

“Which is better, truth that is a lie or the lie that is truth?”

Elie Wiesel

Source: The Judges

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

Elie Wiesel book Night

In an interview with Carol Rittner and Sandra Meyers in Courage To Care - Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, NYU Press, 1986, p. 2. Also quoted by Yad Vashem http://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/about-the-program.html and Nicholas Kristoff in The Silence of the Bystanders https://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/opinion/the-silence-of-bystanders.html, New York Times (March 19, 2006). <br class="br">Source: Night

“I have tried to keep memory alive… I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.”

Elie Wiesel

“Questions outlive the answers.”

Elie Wiesel

“Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Source: Night

“Even in darkness it is possible to create light and encourage compassion. That it is possible to feel free inside a prison. That even in exile, friendship exists and can become an anchor. That one instant before dying, man is still immortal.”

Elie Wiesel

Source: Open Heart

“To remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all.”

Elie Wiesel

“We are all brothers and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive. (pg. 39)”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Source: Night

“The more you ask certain questions, the more dangerous they become.”

Elie Wiesel

Source: The Judges

“The sky is so close to the sea that it is difficult to tell which is reflected in the other, which one needs the other, which one is dominating the other.”

Elie Wiesel book Day

Source: Day

“I needed to know that there was such a thing as love and that it brought smiles and joy in its wake.”

Elie Wiesel book Dawn

Source: Dawn

“When you listen to a witness, you become a witness.”

Elie Wiesel

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

Elie Wiesel

The New York Times October 15, 1986, MAN IN THE NEWS; WITNESS TO EVIL: ELIEZER WEISEL, By JOSEPH BERGER http://www.nytimes.com/1986/10/15/world/man-in-the-news-witness-to-evil-eliezer-weisel.html

“Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.”

Elie Wiesel

“You’re shaking … so am I. It’s because of Jerusalem, isn’t it? One doesn’t go to Jerusalem, one returns to it. That’s one of its mysteries.”

Elie Wiesel book A Beggar in Jerusalem

Source: A Beggar in Jerusalem

“Humanity? Humanity is not concerned with us. Today anything is allowed. Anything is possible.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Source: Night

“To forget a Holocaust is to kill twice”

Elie Wiesel

“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.”

Elie Wiesel

Hope, Despair, and Memory (1986)

“For God's sake, where is God?"
And from within me, I heard a voice answer:
"Where He is? This is where hanging here from this gallows…”

Elie Wiesel book Night

That night, the soup tasted of corpses.
Night (1960)

“If someone had told us in 1945 that in our lifetime religious wars would rage on virtually every continent, that thousands of children would once again be dying of starvation, we would not have believed it. Or that racism and fanaticism would flourish once again, we would not have believed it.”

Elie Wiesel

Hope, Despair, and Memory (1986)

“But now, I no longer pleaded for anything. I was no longer able to lament. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man. Without love or mercy. I was nothing but ashes no, but I felt myself to be stronger than this Almighty to whom my life had been bound for so long. In the midst of these men assembled for prayer, I felt like an observer, a stranger.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

“The absent no longer entered our thoughts. One spoke of them who knows what happened to them? but their fate was not on our minds. We were incapable of thinking. Our senses were numbed, everything was fading into a fog. We no longer clung to anything. The instincts of self-preservation, of self-defense, of pride, had all deserted us. In one terrifying moment of lucidity, I thought of us as damned souls wandering through the void, souls condemned to wander through space until the end of time, seeking redemption, seeking oblivion, without any hope of finding either.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

“The barbed wire that encircled us like a wall did not fill us with real fear. In fact, we felt this was not a bad thing: we were entirely among ourselves. A small Jewish republic…”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

“How are we to reconcile our supreme duty towards memory with the need to forget that is essential to life? No generation has had to confront this paradox with such urgency. The survivors wanted to communicate everything to the living: the victim's solitude and sorrow, the tears of mothers driven to madness, the prayers of the doomed beneath a fiery sky.”

Elie Wiesel

Hope, Despair, and Memory (1986)

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

Elie Wiesel

It's a joke.
In a 1978 interview with John S. Friedman, published in The Paris Review 26 (Spring 1984); and in Elie Wiesel : Conversations (2002) edited by Robert Franciosi, p. 86

“The Hungarian lieutenant went around with a basket and retrieved the last possessions from those who chose not to go on tasting the bitterness of fear.
"There are eighty of you in the car," the German officer added. "If anyone goes missing, you will all be shot, like dogs."
The two disappeared. The doors clanked shut. We had fallen into the trap, up to our necks. The doors were nailed, the way back irrevocably cut off. The world had become a hermetically sealed cattle car.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

“Whenever an angel says "Be not afraid!" you'd better start worrying. A big assignment is on the way.”

Elie Wiesel

As quoted in Spirituality and Liberation : Overcoming the Great Fallacy (1988) by Robert McAfee Brown, p. 136

“It seemed as impossible to conceive of Auschwitz with God as to conceive of Auschwitz without God. Therefore, everything had to be reassessed because everything had changed. With one stroke, mankind's achievements seemed to have been erased. Was Auschwitz a consequence or an aberration of "civilization"? All we know is that Auschwitz called that civilization into question as it called into question everything that had preceded Auschwitz. Scientific abstraction, social and economic contention, nationalism, xenophobia, religious fanaticism, racism, mass hysteria. All found their ultimate expression in Auschwitz.”

Elie Wiesel

Hope, Despair, and Memory (1986)

“Some writings could sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.”

Elie Wiesel

A statement of 1968, as quoted in "How And Why I Write: An Interview with Elie Wiesel" by Heidi Anne Walker, in Journal of Education, Vol. 162 (1980), p. 57
Variants:
Some words are deeds.
Souls on Fire : Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters (1982)
Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.
As quoted in "Nobelists, Auschwitz, and Survival" by Robert McAfee Brown, in Christianity and Crisis, Vol. 48 (7 March 1988), p. 58

“That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS.”

Elie Wiesel

Comments regarding US President Ronald Reagan's proposed visit to a Bitburg cemetery with then German President Helmut Kohl, on receiving the Congressional Gold Medal from Reagan (4/1/1985).

“From time immemorial, people have talked about peace without achieving it. Do we simply lack enough experience? 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.”

Elie Wiesel

As quoted in "Is World Peace on the Horizon?", in The Watchtower (15 April 1991)

“The most important question a human being has to face… What is it? The question, Why are we here?”

Elie Wiesel

&quot;“Why Are We Here?”, in The Watchtower (2006) http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2006768?q=Elie+Wiesel&amp;p=par

“An SS came toward us wielding a club. He commanded:
"Men to the left! Women to the right!"
Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight simple, short words. Yet that was the moment when I left my mother. There was no time to think, and I already felt my father's hand press against mine: we were alone.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

“The beloved objects that we had carried with us from place to place were now left behind in the wagon and, with them, finally, our illusions.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

“"The yellow star? So what? It's not lethal…"
(Poor Father! Of what then did you die?)”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

“We thought it would be enough to tell of the tidal wave of hatred which broke over the Jewish people for men everywhere to decide once and for all to put an end to hatred of anyone who is "different" — whether black or white, Jew or Arab, Christian or Moslem — anyone whose orientation differs politically, philosophically, sexually.”

Elie Wiesel

Hope, Despair, and Memory (1986)

“If anything can, it is memory that will save humanity.”

Elie Wiesel

Hope, Despair, and Memory (1986)

“The street resembled fairgrounds deserted in haste. There was a little of everything: suitcases, briefcases, bags, knives, dishes, banknotes, papers, faded portraits. All the things one planned to take along and finally left behind. They had ceased to matter.
Open rooms everywhere. Gaping doors and windows looked out into the void. It all belonged to everyone since it no longer belonged to anyone. It was there for the taking. An open tomb.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)