Quotes About Humanity

If we had to and were able to suffer the sufferings of everyone, we could not live.

Today, I think that if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of Providence.

Many people — many nations — can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that 'every stranger is an enemy'. For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason.

Nothing belongs to us any more; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we ill have to find ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains.

No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man's presumption made of man in Auschwitz.

In every part of the world, wherever you begin by denying the fundamental liberties of mankind, and equality among people, you move toward the concentration camp system, and it is a road on which it is difficult to halt.

The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.

this is a story interwoven with freezing dawns.)

he) reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving.

For good or evil, we are a single people: the more we become conscious of this, the less difficult and long will be humanity's progress toward justice and peace.

One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.

Here we received the first blows: and it was so new and senseless that we felt no pain, neither in body nor in spirit. Only a profound amazement: how can one hit a man without anger?

Qualcuno, molto tempo fa, ha scritto che anche i libri, come gli esseri umani, hanno un loro destino, imprevedibile, diverso da quello che per loro si desiderava e si attendeva.

Se comprendere è impossibile, conoscere è necessario, perché ciò che è accaduto, può ritornare, le coscienze possono nuovamente essere sedotte e oscurate: anche le nostre.

For us, on the contrary, the Lager is not a punishment; for us, no end is foreseen and the Lager is nothing but a manner of living assigned to us, without limits of time, in the bosom of the Germanic social organism.

Nessuno ebbe animo di venire a vedere che cosa fanno gli uomini quando sanno di dover morire.

It was the very discomfort, the blows, the cold, the thirst that kept us aloft in the void of bottomless despair, both during the journey and after. It was not the will to live, nor a conscious resignation; for few are the men capable of such resolution, and we were but a common sample of humanity.

Distruggere l'uomo è difficile, quasi quanto crearlo: non è stato agevole, non è stato breve, ma ci siete riusciti, tedeschi. Eccoci docili sotto i vostri sguardi: da parte nostra nulla più avete a temere: non atti di rivolta, non parole di sfida, neppure uno sguardo giudice.

Suicide is an act of man and not of the animal.

E ci dicese nell'animo, nuovo per noi, il dolore antico del popolo che non ha terra, il dolore senza speranza dell'esodo ogni secolo rinnovato.

A molti, individui o popoli, può accadere di ritenere, piú o meno consapevolmente, che «ogni straniero è nemico». Per lo piú questa convinzione giace in fondo agli animi come una infezione latente; si manifesta solo in atti saltuari e incoordinati, e non sta all'origine di un sistema di pensiero. Ma quando questo avviene, quando il dogma inespresso diventa premessa maggiore di un sillogismo, allora, al termine della catena, sta il Lager.

Wo sind die Andere? dove sono gli altri? - Forse trasferiti in altri campi ...? - propongo io Schmulek crolla il capo, si rivolge a Walter: - Er will nix verstayen - non vuole capire

We travelled here in the sealed wagons; we saw our women and our children leave towards nothingness; we, transformed into slaves, have marched a hundred times backwards and forwards to our silent labors, killed in our spirit long before our anonymous death. No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man's presumption made of man in Auschwitz.

But here in the Lager there are no criminals nor madmen; no criminals because there is no moral law to contravene, no madmen because we are wholly devoid of free will, as our every action is, in time and place, the only conceivable one.