Elie Wiesel Quotes

We, as human beings, have the capacity for extreme cruelty.

Is the capacity for cruelty inherent in all of us?

The most identifying trait of humanity is our abilty to be inhumane to one another.

The truly frightening flaw in humanity is our capacity for cruelty - we all have it.

I think that human beings are capable of the worst things possible.

Unlike other vices, cruelty, alas, is never boring.

Maybe the devil in human beings isn't the reflection of the devil, perhaps the devil is only a reflection of the savagery and brutality of our kind. Maybe what we've done is create the devil in our own image

I've since discovered that many human beings need no supernatural mentoring to commit acts of savagery; some people are devils in their own right, their telltale horns having grown inward to facilitate their disguise.

I do not see why man should not be just as cruel as nature.

The truth, of course, is that the only necessary and sufficient condition for human beings to murder one another is the simple fact of being human.

Humanity is best described as inhumanity.

Nature has, herself, I fear, imprinted in man a kind of instinct to inhumanity.

Man is the cruelest animal. At tragedies, bullfights, and crucifixions he has so far felt best on earth; and when he invented hell for himself, behold, that was his very heaven.

Life is cruel and we do terrible things to each other.

Inhumanity, n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity.

It is silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars and hypocrites.

The only monsters I have ever known were men.

We need to be clear in calling out evil for what it is. When people will behead a child, and when people will leave people starving on top of a mountain without food or water - 40,000 of them - I don't care what religion it is: It's evil.

Evil is not something superhuman, it's something less than human.

There aren't just bad people that commit genocide; we are all capable of it. It's our evolutionary history.

One of the qualities essential to writing exciting stories, whether for page or screen, is an ability to abandon one's morality. We simply cannot be good writers and good people. One must be able to access one's darkest self, one's venality and pettiness and murderousness.

When humans behave murderously, such as inflicting senseless slaughter of innocents in warfare, we like to blame it on some dark, 'animalistic' instinct.

Man's inhumanity to man is as old as humanity itself. Some people just do evil things. Most do not. A billion people have seen 'Batman' movies over the past 20 years, and they have been entertained and inspired. One man saw it as a sick entry point for mass murder. The one is tragic. The billion are not. I choose to write for the billion.

We humans are a fairly barbarous bunch.

Psychology doesn't like to talk about evil. It likes to talk about bad childhoods. But I very much believe that some people are evil and motivation is not necessary for evil.