Quotes from Elie Wiesel

Look, if I were alone in the world, I would have the right to choose despair, solitude and self-fulfillment. But I am not alone.

Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps. 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, their quests. And so are you.

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

I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes were open and I was alone—terribly alone in a world without God and without man.

It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.

Mankind must remember that peace is not God's gift to his creatures peace is our gift to each other.

Human beings should be held accountable. Leave God alone. He has enough problems.

Rejected by mankind, the condemned do not go so far as to reject it in turn. Their faith in history remains unshaken, and one may well wonder why. They do not despair. The proof: they persist in surviving not only to survive, but to testify.The victims elect to become witnesses.

I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory.

Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only we can give one another.

You'll try to reveal what should remain hidden, you'll try to incite people to learn from the past and rebel, but they will refuse to believe you. They will not listen to you…. You'll possess the truth, you already do; but it's the truth of a madman.

Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.

I do not recall a Jewish home without a book on the table.

In Jewish history there are no coincidences.

After all, God is God because he remembers.

I was very, very religious. And of course I wrote about it in 'Night.' I questioned God's silence. So I questioned. I don't have an answer for that. Does it mean that I stopped having faith? No. I have faith, but I question it.

No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.

Man, as long as he lives, is immortal. One minute before his death he shall be immortal. But one minute later, God wins.

Now, when I hear that Christians are getting together in order to defend the people of Israel, of course it brings joy to my heart. And it simply says, look, people have learned from history.

What is being lost is the magic of the word. I am not an image person. Imagery belongs to another civilization: the caveman. Caveman couldn't express himself so he put images on walls.

Memory feeds a culture, nourishes hope and makes a human, human.

Nobody is stronger, nobody is weaker than someone who came back. There is nothing you can do to such a person because whatever you could do is less than what has already been done to him. We have already paid the price.

Once you bring life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world.

Only one enemy is worse than despair: indifference. In every area of human creativity, indifference is the enemy; indifference of evil is worse than evil, because it is also sterile.