Elie Wiesel Quotes

[Moishe] explained to me, with great emphasis, that every question possessed a power that was lost in the answer....
And why do you pray, Moishe?' I asked him.
I pray to the God within me for the strength to ask Him the real questions.

I have learned two lessons in my life: first, there are no sufficient literary, psychological, or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Second, just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.

There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win.

"The yellow star? So what? It's not lethal..."
(Poor Father! Of what then did you die?)

No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night.

We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

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

Whoever survives a test, whatever it may be, must tell the story. That is his duty.

We cannot indefinitely avoid depressing subject matter, particularly it it is true, and in the subsequent quarter century the world has had to hear a story it would have preferred not to hear - the story of how a cultured people turned to genocide, and how the rest of the world, also composed of cultured people, remained silent in the face of genocide. (v)

BERISH: Men and women are being beaten, tortured and killed—how can one not be afraid of Him? True, they are victims of men. But the killers kill in His name. Not all? True, but numbers are unimportant. Let one killer kill for His glory, and He is guilty. Every man who suffers or causes suffering, every woman who is raped, every child who is tormented implicates Him. What, you need more? A hundred or a thousand? Listen: either He is responsible or He is not. If He is let’s judge Him; if He is not, let Him stop judging us.

For in the end, it is all about memory, its sources and its magnitude, and, of course, its consequences.

The more you ask certain questions, the more dangerous they become.

To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.

Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.

They called him Moishe the Beadle, as if his entire life he had never had a surname.