206 Quotes by Primo Levi

But formulas are holy as prayers, decree-laws, and dead languages, and not an iota in them can be changed. And so my ammonium chloride, the twin of a happy love and a liberating book, by now completely useless and a bit harmful, is religiously ground into the chromate anti-rust paint on the short of that lake, and nobody knows why anymore.

We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still posses one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last – the power to refuse our consent.

The sea of grief has no shores, no bottom; no one can sound its depths.

Het lijkt me overbodig hieraan toe te voegen dat geen enkel feit verzonnen is.

Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting.” by Primo Levi in Drowned.

Nothing belongs to us any more; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we ill have to find ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains.

Finally, and fundamentally, didn’t he, who was honest and open, smell the foul odor of Fascist truths that were polluting the sky, didn’t he find it disgraceful that a thinking man should be asked to believe without thinking? Didn’t he feel disgust for all the dogmas, all the unproved declarations, all the imperatives.

The institution represented an attempt to shift onto others – specifically, the victims – the burden of guilt, so that they were deprived of even the solace of innocence.

In the midst of the smoke and noise Dov shouted into his ear: “Empty the gun now. Don’t hold back. We’re fighting for three lines in the history books.