Primo Levi Quotes

To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.

Not everyone can stand up and be a hero, Princess. Some prefer to surrender to the inevitable and salve their consciences with the gift of survival.

A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.

Many who would not take the last cookie would take the last lifeboat.

Morality is a luxury we can't afford out here. There's no right or wrong, just survival or death.

What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship's axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.

Grub first, then ethics.

I believe it is universally understood and acknowledged that all men will ever act correctly, unless they have a motive to do otherwise.

When we are confronted with extreme situations, we forget about moral issues; we simply act and must then accept the consequences.

I was a monster. I don't deny it. I wasn't a monster until a few years ago. But you have to be a monster to survive in New York City. New York City doesn't give a damn about violence.

When we were engaged in the problems of survival we had no time to have anything to do with culture.

Necessity makes an honest man a knave.

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.

I'll say anything to live.

In order to endure death and horror one tends to kill ones own humanity, which is a much greater danger than not being able to bear it.

The virtues and vices are all put in motion by interest.

I do what I've got to do to survive, to keep my teeth in my head, and my head on my shoulders. I apologize to whoever can't put that together and understand that.

Early in my career I had to be a goon to survive. I did everything I had to do and probably some things I shouldn't have.

It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, because you can remain the friend of the sufferer; who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even another murderer.

There are times when the end justifies the means. But when you build an argument based on a whole series of such times, you may find that you've constructed an entire philosophy of evil." --Luke Skywalker

You can't kill us all, human.' He was right. I raised the machine gun a little. 'True, but who's going to be first in line?

The attempt to remove evil from the world by killing a thousand evil - doers, only adds to the evil in the world.

One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue.

Kill a man who needs killing, and sometimes others pay for it. The question is, was it worth doing it anyway? There's always a balance, you know. Good and evil. Light and Shadow. We would not be human if there wasn't a balance.

If you choose the lesser of two evils, you are still choosing evil.