624 Quotes by Elie Wiesel

The condemned man’s traditional last meal is a joke,” I said loudly, “a joke in the worst possible taste, an insult to the corpse that he is about to be. What does a man care if he dies with an empty stomach?” The.

His last word had been my name. A summons. And I had not responded.

We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant.

To live is to betray the dead. We hasten to bury and forget them because we are ashamed; we feel guilty towards them.

I knew that I was no longer arguing with him but with Death itself, with Death that he had already chosen.

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.

My hands were aching, I was clenching them so hard. To strangle the doctor and the others! To set the whole world on fire! My father’s murderers! But even the cry stuck in my throat.

Love is worth as much as prayer. Sometimes more.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain. There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred pages are there. Only you don’t see them.