206 Quotes by Primo Levi

Quien quema libros termina tarde o temprano por quemar hombres – Heinrich Heine.

Nessuno ebbe animo di venire a vedere che cosa fanno gli uomini quando sanno di dover morire.

Since it is difficult to distinguish true prophets from false, it is as well to regard all prophets with suspicion.

Survival without renunciation of any part of one’s own moral world – apart from powerful and direct interventions by fortune – was conceded only to very few superior individuals, made of the stuff of martyrs and saints.

Everybody is somebody’s Jew. And today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis.

The tunes are few, a dozen, the same ones every day, morning and evening : marches to popular songs dear to every German. They lie engraved on our minds and will be the last thing in Lager that we shall forget : they are the voice of the Lager, the perceptible expression of its geometrical madness, of the resolution of others to annihilate us first as men in order to kill us more slowly afterwards.

The triumph of human identity and worth over the pathology of human destruction glows virtually everywhere in Levi’s writing.

Ik kan niet begrijpen, niet verdragen dat men een mens beoordeelt niet naar wat hij is, maar naar de groep waar hij toevallig toe behoort.

Many people – many nations – can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that ‘every stranger is an enemy’. For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason.