Quotes from Elie Wiesel

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

This day I ceased to plead. I was no longer capable of lamentation. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused.

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

Never again becomes more than a slogan: It's a prayer, a promise, a vow. There will never again be hatred, people say. Never again jail and torture. Never again the suffering of innocent people, or the shooting of starving, frightened, terrified children. And never again the glorification of base, ugly, dark violence. It's a prayer.

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

We believed in God, trusted in man, and lived with the illusion that every one of us has been entrusted with a sacred spark.

Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.

A word is worth a thousand pictures.

We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else.

Certain things, certain events, seem inexplicable only for a time: up to the moment when the veil is torn aside.

Just as there are predatory birds, so there are predatory ideas: I came under their spell. . . .Just as the survivors say that no one will ever understand the victims, what I must tell you is that you will never understand the executioners.

A man can laugh while he suffers.

We must choose between the violence of adults and the smiles of children, between the ugliness of hate and the will to oppose it. Between inflicting suffering and humiliation on our fellow man and offering him the solidarity and hope he deserves. Or not.

Violence is not the answer. Terrorism is the most dangerous of answers.

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.

There are moments when I think it will never end, that it will last indefinitely. It's like the rain. Here the rain, like everything else, suggests permanence and eternity. I say to myself: it's raining today and it's going to rain tomorrow and the next day, the next week and the next century.

We're alone, but we are capable of communicating to one another both our loneliness and our desire to break through it. You say, 'I'm alone.' Someone answers, 'I'm alone too.' There's a shift in the scale of power. A bridge is thrown between the two abysses.

Life is really fascinated only by death. It vibrates only when it comes in contact with death.

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

I am much more afraid of my good deeds that please me than of my bad deeds that repel me.

If life is not a celebration, why remember it ? If life --- mine or that of my fellow man --- is not an offering to the other, what are we doing on this earth?

Next to him lay his violin, trampled, an eerily poignant little corpse.

You shouldn't act as a spokesperson for someone who's trying to impose his will on you.

Each man was his own executioner and his own victim.