Quotes About Humanity

There is nothing sacred, nothing uplifting, in hatred or in death. In

Je me souvenais de ce que mon vieux maître à la barbe jaunie m'avait dit un jour en m'expliquant le sixième commandement: pourquoi un homme n'aurait-il pas le droit de tuer? En tuant, expliquait-il, l'homme devient Dieu. Et nous n'avons pas le droit de le devenir trop facilement.

Yes, man is stronger, greater than God. When Adam and Eve deceived You, You chased them from paradise. When You were displeased by Noah's generation, You brought down the Flood. When Sodom lost Your favor, You caused the heavens to rain down fire and damnation. But look at these men whom You have betrayed, allowing them to be tortured, slaughtered, gassed, and burned, what do they do? They pray before You! They praise Your name!

I shall never forgive myself. Nor shall I ever forgive the world for having pushed me against the wall, for having turned me into a stranger, for having awakened in me the basest, most primitive instincts.

NEVER SHALL I FORGET that night , the first night in camp , that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed . Never shall I forget that smoke . Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky . Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever .

Men to the left! Women to the right! Eight words spokern quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight simple, short words. Yet that was the moment when I left my mother.

Hubiera querido agregar: ¿por qué agradecerle? Hacía mucho que no comprendía qué había hecho el buen Dios para merecer al hombre.

we had to get up whenever a Kapo came in to check if, by chance, somebody had a new pair of shoes. If so, we had to hand them over. No use protesting; the blows multiplied and, in the end, one still had to hand them over. I had new shoes myself. But as they were covered with a thick coat of mud, they had not been noticed. I thanked God, in an improvised prayer, for having created mud in His infinite and wondrous universe.

The word "chimney" here was not an abstraction; it floated in the air, mingled with the smoke. It was, perhaps, the only word that had a real meaning in this place.

And what do you take care of? What people throw away, what history rejects, what memory denies. The smile of a starving child, the years of its dying mother, the silent prayers of the condemned man and the cries of his friend: I gather them up and preserve them. In this city, i am memory.

They were forced to dig huge trenches. When they had finished their work, the men from the Gestapo began theirs. Without passion or haste, they shot their prisoners, who were forced to approach the trench one by one and offer their necks. Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for the machine guns. This took place in the Galician forest, near Kolomay

Death alone is invisible. Man's end was the same everywhere.

Suffering is given to the living, not to the dead," he said looking right through me. "It is man's duty to make it cease, not to increase it. One hour of suffering less is already a victory over fate.

It is in man that God must be loved, because the love of God goes through the love of man. Whoever loves God exclusively, namely excluding man, reduces his love and his God to the level of abstraction. Beshtian Hasidism denies all abstraction.

We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear. All is grace. If the Almighty is the Almighty, the last word for each of us belongs to him.

I'm going to teach you the art of distinguishing between day and night. Always look at a window, and failing that look into the eyes of a man. If you see a face, any face, then you can be sure that night has succeeded day. For, believe me, night has a face." Then

It was at Auschwitz that human beings underwent their first mutations. Without Auschwitz, there would have been no Hiroshima. Or genocide in Africa. Or attempts to dehumanize man by reducing him to a number, an object: it was at Auschwitz that the methods to be used were conceived, catalogued, and perfected. It was at Auschwitz that men mutilated and gambled with the future. The despair begotten at Auschwitz will linger for generations.

I remember he asked his father, "Can this be true? This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?" And

In front of us, those flames. In the air, the smell of burning flesh. It must have been around midnight. We had arrived. In Birkenau.

He was playing his life. His whole being was gliding over the strings. His unfulfilled hopes. His charred past, his extinguished future. He played that which he would never play again. I shall never forget Juliek. How could I forget this concert given before an audience of the dead and dying? Even today, when I hear that particular piece by Beethoven, my eyes close and out of the darkness emerges the pale and melancholy face of my Polish comrade bidding farewell to an audience of dying men.

The Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech Delivered by

I explain to him how naïve we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant.

Special units would then disinter the corpses and burn them. Thus, for the first time in history, Jews were not only killed twice but denied burial in a cemetery.

Could men and women who consider it normal to assist the weak, to heal the sick, to protect small children, and to respect the wisdom of their elders understand what happened there? Would they be able to comprehend how, within that cursed universe, the masters tortured the weak and massacred the children, the sick, and the old?