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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   quotes 12   likes

Elie Wiesel Quotes

“They called him Moishe the Beadle, as if his entire life he had never had a surname.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

Life

“A destruction only man can provoke, only man can prevent. Mankind must remember that peace is not God's gift to his creatures, it is our gift to each other.”

Elie Wiesel

Hope, Despair, and Memory (1986)

God , Peace

“We tried. It was not easy. At first, because of the language; language failed us. We would have to invent a new vocabulary, for our own words were inadequate, anemic. And then too, the people around us refused to listen; and even those who listened refused to believe; and even those who believed could not comprehend. Of course they could not. Nobody could. The experience of the camps defies comprehension.”

Elie Wiesel

Hope, Despair, and Memory (1986)

People

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

Elie Wiesel

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. 85

“"Faster! Faster! Move, you lazy good-for-nothings!" the Hungarian police were screaming.
That was when I began to hate them, and my hatred remains our only link today. They were our first oppressors. They were the first faces of hell and death.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

Death , Hate , Hell

“The bell. It was already time to part, to go to bed. The bell regulated everything. It gave me orders and I executed them blindly. I hated that bell. Whenever I happened to dream of a better world, I imagined a universe without a bell.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

Hate , World , Dreams , Imagination

“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.”

Elie Wiesel

Interview in O : The Oprah Magazine (November 2000)

Smile , Feeling , Time , Heart

“Most people thought we would remain in the ghetto until the end of the war, until the arrival of the Red Army. Afterward everything would be as before. The ghetto was ruled by neither German nor Jew; it was ruled by delusion.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

War , People

“Just as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live without hope. If dreams reflect the past, hope summons the future.”

Elie Wiesel

Hope, Despair, and Memory (1986)

Dreams , Hope , Past , Future

“The duty of the survivor is to bear testimony to what happened. . . You have to warn people that these things can happen, that evil can be unleashed. Race hatred, violence, idolatries—they still flourish.”

Elie Wiesel

As quoted in "Will Hatred Ever End?", in The Watchtower (15 June 1995)

People , Evil

“The night had passed completely. The morning star shone in the sky. I too had become a different person. The student of Talmud, the child I was, had been consumed by the flames. All that was left was a shape that resembled me. My soul had been invaded - and devoured - by a black flame.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

Soul , Star , Personality , Night

“His last word had been my name. He had called out to me and I had not answered.
I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I was out of tears. And deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like: Free at last!”

Elie Wiesel book Night

About the death of his father
Night (1960)

Pain , Search , Tear

“I rarely speak about God. To God yes. I protest against Him. I shout at Him. But open discourse about the qualities of God, about the problems that God imposes, theodicy, no. And yet He is there, in silence, in filigree.”

Elie Wiesel

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. 87

God , Problem , Silence

“Close your eyes and listen. Listen to the silent screams of terrified mothers, the prayers of anguished old men and women. Listen to the tears of children. Jewish children, a beautiful little girl among them, with golden hair, whose vulnerable tenderness has never left me. Look and listen as they walk towards dark flames so gigantic that the planet itself seemed in danger.”

Elie Wiesel

From an address given at Auschwitz in occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Holocaust (27 January 1995)

Women , Men , Children , Beauty

“I had anger but never hate. Before the war, I was too busy studying to hate. After the war, I thought, What's the use? To hate would be to reduce myself.”

Elie Wiesel

Interview in O : The Oprah Magazine (November 2000)

Hate , War , Business , Study

“A recollection. The time: After the war. The place: Paris. A young man struggles to readjust to life. His mother, his father, his small sister are gone. He is alone. On the verge of despair. And yet he does not give up. On the contrary, he strives to find a place among the living. He acquires a new language. He makes a few friends who, like himself, believe that the memory of evil will serve as a shield against evil; that the memory of death will serve as a shield against death.”

Elie Wiesel

Hope, Despair, and Memory (1986)

Life , Death , War , Sister

“Thousands of lips repeated the benediction, bent over like trees in a storm.
Blessed be God's name?
Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves? Because He kept six crematoria working day and night, including Sabbath and the Holy Days? Because in His great might, He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death? How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in the furnaces?”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

Death , God , Children , Tree

“People thought this was a good thing. We would no longer have to look at all those hostile faces, endure those hate-filled stares. No more fear. No more anguish. We would live entirely among Jews, among brothers…”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

Hate , Hostility , People , Fear

“What is abnormal is that I am normal. 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.”

Elie Wiesel

After being asked "What does it take to be normal again, after having your humanity stripped away by the Nazis?" in an interview in O : The Oprah Magazine (November 2000)

Love , Life , Beauty , Girl

“After the war we reassured ourselves that it would be enough to relate a single night in Treblinka, to tell of the cruelty, the senselessness of murder, and the outrage born of indifference: it would be enough to find the right word and the propitious moment to say it, to shake humanity out of its indifference and keep the torturer from torturing ever again.”

Elie Wiesel

Hope, Despair, and Memory (1986)

War , Night , Indifference

“"Yisgadal, veyiskadash, shmey raba… May His name be celebrated and sanctified…" whispered my father.
For the first time, I felt anger rising within me. Why should I sanctify His name? The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent. What was there to thank Him for?”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

Universe , Time , Anger

“None of us is in a position to eliminate war, but it is our obligation to denounce it and expose it in all its hideousness. War leaves no victors, only victims.”

Elie Wiesel

Hope, Despair, and Memory (1986)

War

“No one was praying for the night to pass quickly. The stars were but sparks of the immense conflagration that was consuming us. Were this conflagration to be extinguished one day, nothing would be left in the sky but extinct stars and unseeing eyes.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

Star , Night

“Of course some wars may have been necessary or inevitable, but none was ever regarded as holy. For us, a holy war is a contradiction in terms. War dehumanizes, war diminishes, war debases all those who wage it. The Talmud says, "Talmidei hukhamim marbin shalom baolam" (It is the wise men who will bring about peace). Perhaps, because wise men remember best.”

Elie Wiesel

Hope, Despair, and Memory (1986)

Men , War , Peace

“We were outside. The icy wind whipped my face. I was constantly biting my lips so that they wouldn't freeze. All around me, what appeared to be a dance of death. My head was reeling. I was walking through a cemetery. Among the stiffened corpses, there were logs of wood. Not a sound of distress, not a plaintive cry, nothing but mass agony and silence. Nobody asked anyone for help. One died because one had to. No point in making trouble.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

Death , Silence , Appearance , Help

“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.”

Elie Wiesel

Hope, Despair, and Memory (1986)

Search , Despair , Dead

“When a Jew visits Jerusalem for the first time, it is not the first time; it is a homecoming.”

Elie Wiesel

As quoted in "Elie Wiesel: Jerusalem is Above Politics" in Arutz Sheva (17 April 2010) http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/137057#.VwlePdcYoxA

Time

“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.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

“MARIA: Hell? Is he talking about hell? Good. For a moment I was afraid he was making sense.”

Elie Wiesel The Trial of God

Act II (p. 93)
The Trial of God (1979)

Sense , Hell , Making love

“MENDEL: Once you’re on your knees, you can’t stand up straight again.”

Elie Wiesel The Trial of God

Act I (p. 48)
The Trial of God (1979)

“BERISH: I distrust miracles. They exist only in books, and books say anything.”

Elie Wiesel The Trial of God

Act I (p. 40)
The Trial of God (1979)

Books

“Yisgadal, veyiskadash, shmey raba…May His name be celebrated and sanctified…”

Elie Wiesel book Night

whispered my father.
For the first time, I felt anger rising within me. Why should I sanctify His name? The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent. What was there to thank Him for?
Night (1960)

“The yellow star? So what? It's not lethal…”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Poor Father! Of what then did you die?
Night (1960)

Star