Elie Wiesel Quotations

Elie Wiesel is someone I have long admired, both as a person and a writer. I'm a bit puzzled and a lot disappointed with his current stance - given his ideas and his own personal experiences - on Iraq and the apparent legalization of terror tactics by the freest nation of the world, but then, I suppose, nobody's perfect.

1. There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

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

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

4. The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.

5. Whenever I dreamed of a better world, I could only imagine a universe with no bells.

6. We were masters of nature, masters of the world. We had forgotten everything-death, fatigue, our natural needs. Stronger than cold or hunger, stronger than the shots and the desire to die, condemned and wandering, mere numbers, we were the only men on earth.

7. I shall always remember that smile. From which world did it come?

8. The act of writing is for me often nothing more than the secret or conscious desire to carve words on a tombstone: to the memory of a town forever vanished, to the memory of a childhood in exile, to the memory of all those I loved and who, before I could tell them I loved them, went away.

9. Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.

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

11. I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

12. I decided to devote my life to telling the story because I felt that having survived I owe something to the dead. and anyone who does not remember betrays them again.

13. Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.

14. Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.

15. A destruction, an annihilation that only man can provoke, only man can prevent.

16. Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.

17. Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.

18. Most people think that shadows follow, precede or surround beings or objects. The truth is that they also surround words, ideas, desires, deeds, impulses and memories.

19. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant.

20. Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.

21. Hate is contagious, like a cancer. It goes from one cell to another, one root to another, one person to another, one group to another. If it’s not stopped, it can invade the a whole country, the whole world.

22. In the beginning, I was convinced that if I were to shout loud enough, they would change. Now I know they won’t change. But if I shout even louder, it’s because I don’t want them to change me.

23. What I want, what I’ve hoped for all my life, is that my past should not become your children’s future.

24. Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.

25. I write to understand as much as to be understood.

26. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony, have done something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses.

27. Indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor - never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees - not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own.

26. The problem with religion is when it becomes fanatic. As everything else, nationalism may be good, patriotism may be good, but if it goes beyond, then it becomes fanaticism. And fanaticism produces exactly what you said - killing, violence, hatred - because then, the person who believes in God believes that only he or she has God’s ear; that only he or she has the right to speak in God’s name; that only he or she knows what God wants, only he or she has the power and, therefore, the right to impose his or her belief on others. In other words, that fanatic person wants to be the jailer of all of us. They would like us to be their prisoners. They actually would like God to become their prisoner.

29. Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life.

30. What you need is imagination, and, of course, some measure of compassion.