“Human beings should be held accountable. Leave God alone. He has enough problems.”
“Look, if I were alone in the world, I would have the right to choose despair, solitude and self-fulfillment. But I am not alone.”
“I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I've been closer to him for that reason.”
“I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory.”
“It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.”
“I decided to devote my life to telling the story because I felt that having survived I owe something to the dead. and anyone who does not remember betrays them again.”
“Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.”
“Man, as long as he lives, is immortal. One minute before his death he shall be immortal. But one minute later, God wins.”
“No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.”
“Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.”
“No human race is superior no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.”
“I was very, very religious. And of course I wrote about it in 'Night.' I questioned God's silence. So I questioned. I don't have an answer for that. Does it mean that I stopped having faith? No. I have faith, but I question it.”
“Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.”
“Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.”
“After all, God is God because he remembers.”
“Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only we can give one another.”
“In Jewish history there are no coincidences.”
“Now, when I hear that Christians are getting together in order to defend the people of Israel, of course it brings joy to my heart. And it simply says, look, people have learned from history.”
“I do not recall a Jewish home without a book on the table.”
“Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.”
“Some stories are true that never happened.”
“What does mysticism really mean? It means the way to attain knowledge. It's close to philosophy, except in philosophy you go horizontally while in mysticism you go vertically.”
“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.”
“Mankind must remember that peace is not God's gift to his creatures peace is our gift to each other.”
“Peace is our gift to each other.”
“Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe.”
“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”
“Most people think that shadows follow, precede or surround beings or objects. The truth is that they also surround words, ideas, desires, deeds, impulses and memories.”