Elie Wiesel Quotes

Yesterday, we fought wars which destroyed cities. Today, we are concerned with avoiding a war which will destroy the earth. We can adapt atomic energy to produce electricity and move ships, but can we control its use in anger?

We must halt the arms race before it halts humanity.

In a nuclear war there would be no victors, only victims. The truth of peace requires that all ... strive for a progressive and concerted nuclear disarmament.

In my humble opinion, in the nuclear world, the true enemy is war itself.

The end of the Cold War removed the immediate causes of whole destruction but not the threat contained in our knowledge. We must tame this knowledge with the ideals of justice, caring, and compassion summoned from our common human spiritual and moral heritage, if we are to live in peace and serenity in the twenty-first century.

Let us not deceive ourselves; we must elect world peace or world destruction.

Nuclear war is such an emotional subject that many people see the weapons themselves as the common enemy of humanity.

What we need is Star Peace and not Star Wars.

Peace is the one condition of survival in this nuclear age.

The choice, however, is as clear now for nations as it was once for the individual: peace or extinction.

If we don't end war, war will end us.

In a nuclear age, each of us is threatened when peace is not secured everywhere.

We do not believe that a nuclear war should be fought and we do not believe that a nuclear war can be won.

If we don't blow ourselves up, this is going to be a really wonderful world.

I can't believe that this world can go on beyond our generation and on down to succeeding generations with this kind of weapon on both sides poised at each other without someday some fool or some maniac or some accident triggering the kind of war that is the end of the line for all of us. And I just think of what a sigh of relief would go up from everyone on this earth if someday-and this is what I have-my hope, way in the back of my head-is that if we start down the road to reduction, maybe one day in doing that, somebody will say, 'Why not all the way? Let's get rid of all these things'.

Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn't matter whether we use them or not. They will destroy us either way.

Cannot swords be turned to plowshares? Can we and all nations not live in peace? In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us? What could be more alien to the universal aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war?

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts. And the way to make sure it never starts is to abolish the dangerous costly nuclear stockpiles which imprison mankind.

And now, as in no other age, we seek it [peace] because we have been warned, by the power of modern weapons, that peace may be the only climate possible for human life itself.

May the conscience and the common sense of the peoples be awakened, so that we may reach a new stage in the life of nations, where people will look back on war as an incomprehensible aberration of their forefathers!

Even a fool could see that one didn't need a war, nuclear or otherwise, to destroy oneself; the rising cost of weaponry could do that quite nicely.

Since the advent of nuclear weapons, it seems clear that there is no longer any alternative to peace, if there is to be a happy and well world.

You measure peace with guns, progress in megatons. Who's left when the war is won?

Any fool can start a war, and once he's done so, even the wisest of men are helpless to stop it - especially if it's a nuclear war.

I advocate world government because I am convinced that there is no other possible way of eliminating the most terrible danger in which man has ever found himself. The objective of avoiding total destruction must have priority over any other objective.