Elie Wiesel Quotes

It is difficult to resist the conclusion that the twentieth-century statesman whom the Thomas Jefferson of 1793 would have admired most is Pol Pot.

Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.

The rise of fascism in Europe sent most Americans home. Some black American communists who had emigrated to the Soviet Union perished in Stalin's purges of the late 1930s.

It's not the possibility of Stalinism in the U.S. that's worrying me, it's the fact that the Stalinist C.P. seems doomed to fail and to bring down with it all the humanitarian tendencies I personally believe in--all the while acting as a mould on which its obverse the fascist mentality is made--and this recent massacre is certainly a sign of Stalinism's weakness not of its strength. None of that has anything to do with Marx's work--but it certainly does influence one's attitude towards a given political party.

The book that really, really shaped my politics and has forever is Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon," which is a novel based on terrible fact about what it was like in Russia during Stalin's time when people actually believed that to get to the point where the Proletariat would triumph, anything that was necessary to be done should be done; the means didn't count.

[He] saw communism for the sham that it was--a bunch of brutes who seized power in the name of the people, only to repress the very people they claimed to champion.

I will not pretend that if I had to choose between communism and Nazism I would choose communism.

There were nowhere more docile disciples of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin than the Nazis were.

It's the story of an American who wants to become a dictator and goes to Europe with a sidekick to interview various Fascists to find out how the Nazis and Mussolini got into power.

Because if you lived, as I did, several years under Nazi totalitarianism, and then 20 years in communist totalitarianism, you would certainly realize how precious freedom is, and how easy it is to lose your freedom.

I lived under the Nazis and under the Communists.

If you listen carefully to Rick Santorum, he sounds more like Stalin than Pope Innocent III.

Baathism in Iraq equals Nazism in Germany.

Socialism is communism without the firing squad.

As a matter of fact, it is the fascist minded men of America who are the real enemies of our institutions.... It is these men who, pretending that they would save us from communism, would superimpose upon America an equally dreaded fascism.

In the social equation, the value of a single life is nil; in the cosmic equation, it is infinite... Not only communism, but any political movement which implicitly relies on purely utilitarian ethics, must become a victim to the same fatal error. It is a fallacy as naïve as a mathematical teaser, and yet its consequences lead straight to Goya's Disasters, to the reign of the guillotine, the torture chambers of the Inquisition, or the cellars of the Lubianka.

If you depart from moral absolutes, you go into a bottomless pit. Communism and Nazism were catastrophic evils which both derived from moral relativism. Their differences were minor compared to their similarities.

The Iraqi Baath Socialist Party was modelled in large part on admiration for European National Socialist and Fascist movements, hoped to emulate them especially in their nationalism against the West. But mutated by Saddam Hussein it became also one that very, very much admired, and grew a special moustache in admiration of the work of Yosif Vissarionovitch Dzugashvili, the great Georgian known to us historically as Stalin. So you had him in modern Iraq, a regime in our own time, that was openly, directly modelled upon the two most extreme examples of European totalitarianism.

It is no accident that Hitler, Lenin, Pol Pot and other butchers of note took special pains early in their despotic careers to suppress religion and undermine the traditional family. Theophobes would find such a characterization truly horrifying, but it's true. This explains why theophobia - while popular in faculty lounges, journalism seminars and Hollywood bacchanals - has not and probably never will attract a public following of any appreciable influence or size.

Many who think themselves infinitely superior to the aberrations of Nazism, and sincerely hate all manifestations, work at the same time for ideals whose realization would lead straight to the abhorred tyranny.

The modern revisionists and reactionaries call us Stalinists, thinking that they insult us and, in fact, that is what they have in mind. But, on the contrary, they glorify us with this epithet; it is an honor for us to be Stalinists for while we maintain such a stand the enemy cannot and will never force us to our knees.

And who can deny that Stalin and Mao, not to mention Pol Pot and a host of others, all committed atrocities in the name of Communist ideology that was explicitly atheistic.

I don't believe that either fascism or communism is the solution or that they may come back on this earth.

Churchill knew instinctively what was wrong with communism - that it repressed liberty; that it replaced individual discretion with state control; that it entailed the curtailment of democracy, and therefore that it was tyrannous.

The brutality of communism was quickly swept under history's rug, in large part because so many on the left had embraced it as the solution to humankind's problems.