Elie Wiesel Quotes

Genocide is not a legitimate option. It's not ok to decide that an entire population has no right to live in the world. No matter whether these relationships are very proximate or very distant, there is no entitlement to expunge a population or to demean its basic humanity.

The Holocaust is not a cheap soap opera. The Holocaust is not a romantic novel. It is something else.

But when the good people do know, as they certainly do, that three million persons (at the least estimate) were starved to death in one year by the methods they approve, why do they still fraternize with the murderers and support the measures? Because they have been told that the lingering death of the three millions might ultimately benefit a greater number. The argument applies equally well to cannibalism.

How did [the Holocaust] happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said, 'My top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.'

Call me an extremist but killing a few hundred million people seems like the sort of method that might have unintended consequences.

There are no parallels to the life of the concentration camps. All seeming parallels create confusion and distract attention from what is essential. Forced labor in prisons and penal colonies, banishment, slavery, all seem for a moment to offer helpful comparisons, but on closer examination lead nowhere.

If a man has his throat cut in Paris, it's a murder. If 50,000 people are murdered in the east, it is a question.

Summer came. For the book thief, everything was going nicely. For me, the sky was the color of Jews. When their bodies had finished scouring for gaps in the door, their souls rose up. When their fingernails had scratched at the wood and in some cases were nailed into it by the sheer force of desperation, their spirits came toward me, into my arms, and we climbed out of those shower facilities, onto the roof and up, into eternity's certain breadth. They just kept feeding me. Minute after minute. Shower after shower.

By genocide we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group.

Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. As it is, they succumbed anyway in their millions.

This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave.

Perhaps some day someone will explain how, on the level of man, Auschwitz was possible; but on the level of God, it will forever remain the most disturbing of mysteries.

The only solution is to kill 600 people in one night. Let the UN and Bill Clinton and everyone else make a scene - and it is over for 20 years.

The Holocaust is not only a tragedy of the Jewish people, it is a failure of humanity as a whole.

As the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel warned years ago, to forget a holocaust is to kill twice.

What is the difference between burning and gassing people in ovens and doing it to a whole nation out in the open?

I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it . . .

We Gypsies know that where Jews are killed, Gypsies are always murthered too. And then a lot of other people, usually.

Killing one person makes you a murderer. Killing a million people makes you a king. Killing them all makes you God.

The whole plan of extermination was nothing less than a cold blooded, calculated political measure, having for its object the annihilation of a superior element in the population, which might prove troublesome, and to this must be added the motive of greed.

I am certain, however, that those responsible for the murder of millions of Germans will never be brought to justice.

Cambodia was not a mistake; it was a crime. The world is diminished by the experience.

George W.Bush can go and kill thousands of Iraqis every day. By making people believe they are the enemy, and not human beings any more. If evil has an address, a nationality, you can exterminate all of them. This is fascism.

I have given orders to my Death units to exterminate without mercy or pity men, women and children belonging to the Polish speaking race... After all, who remembers today the extermination of the Armenians?

The truth is, it's very hard looking back... we look at holocaust now with such knowledge and such a sense of the horror of what it was, that it's hard to believe even now that in 1930s and 1940s, before something like this had happened, that it could be impossible to imagine the extent of this horror.