Quotes About Primo Levi

Monsters exist," wrote Primo Levi of his experience at Auschwitz. "But they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are . . . the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.

We began our visit at the archives. When we entered, the architectural plans for the crematoria were already spread out on the table. Some of these meticulous plans had been drawn by inmates, who, Robert Jan pointed out, signed them with their prison numbers, no names. All I could think of at that moment was Primo Levi's observation about his time in Auschwitz, where a number was tattooed on his arm: "Only a man is worthy of a name."6

Primo Levi of his experience at Auschwitz. "But they

Again and again, Primo Levi's work is described as indispensable, essential, necessary. None of those terms overstate the case, but they do prepare readers new to Levi for a forbiddingly educative experience, making him a writer unlike all others and the experience of reading him a chore. Which it isn't.

For me God existed in Primo Levi's writing, in the moments of reprieve he described when one human granted another respect in that godless wasteland of cruelty.

As Primo Levi was to warn the world after the Holocaust, it will always be in the interests of the perpetrators, after a great crime is identified, to say that they, too, were helplessly caught up in it, and also suffered. But Ordzhonokidze was saying more that that.

Primo Levi was three years old when, between 26–28 October 1922 an obscure political agitator, Benito Mussolini, staged a dramatic assault on Italy's ailing Liberal government.

The triumph of human identity and worth over the pathology of human destruction glows virtually everywhere in Levi's writing.

it is urgent that my chemical alter ego, so in love with digressions, get back on the rails, which is that of fornicating with matter in order to support myself

Auschwitz: un nombre carente de cualquier significado entonces para nosotros pero que tenía que corresponder a un lugar de este mundo.

Primo Levi laid bare the oldest function assigned to music. Music, he writes, was felt to be a "malediction." It was a "hypnosis of continuous rhythm that annihilates thought and numbs pain.