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Sometimes I am asked if I know 'the response to Auschwitz I answer that not only do I not know it, but that I don't even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has a response.

Elie Wiesel

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Elie Wiesel
Age: 87 †
Born: 1928
Born: September 30
Died: 2016
Died: July 2
Autobiographer
Humanist
Journalist
Judaic Scholar
Novelist
Philosopher
Political Activist
Professor
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Sighetu Marmaţiei
Eliezer Wiesel
A-7713
Élie Wiesel
Even
Magnitude
Holocaust
Tragedy
Response
Answer
Asked
Answers
Sometimes
Auschwitz

More quotes by Elie Wiesel

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I try to see their moral relevance [in the Bible] and, of course, to admire the literary beauty of the text. Prophetic poetry: No one has written the way Isaiah does.
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You shouldn’t act as a spokesperson for someone who’s trying to impose his will on you.
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I listen to music when I write. I need the musical background. Classical music. I'm behind the times. I'm still with Baroque music, Gregorian chant, the requiems, and with the quartets of Beethoven and Brahms. That is what I need for the climate, for the surroundings, for the landscape: the music.
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In Jewish tradition the Talmud is said to have been given on Sinai.
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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.
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If you ask me what I want to achieve, it's to create an awareness, which is already the beginning of teaching.
Elie Wiesel
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If there is one person on the planet who still is suffering from loneliness and from pain or despair, and we don't know about it, or we don't want to know about it, then something is wrong with the world.
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Philosophy is a slow process of logic and logical discourse: A bringing B bringing C and so forth. In mysticism you can jump from A to Z. But the ultimate objective is the same. It's knowledge. It's truth.
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In those dark times, one rose to the very heights of humanity by simply remaining human.
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Holy War is a contradiction of terms.
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No one has written the way Isaiah does. The royal style, the majesty of the language. He is called the prince of the prophets. No one has written like that. I've studied ancient literature, Homer, for example, but it's not the same thing.
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I don't know the real answer, my answer to anything which is essentially human relations is education. Whatever the answer is, education must be its measured component and if you try to educate with generosity not with triumphalism I think sometimes it works, especially young people, that's why I teach, I've been teaching all my life.
Elie Wiesel
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I believe that all the survivors are mad. One time or another their madness will explode. You cannot absorb that much madness and not be influenced by it. That is why the children of survivors are so tragic. I see them in school. They don't know how
Elie Wiesel
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When you listen to a witness, you become a witness.
Elie Wiesel
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It is by his freedom that a man knows himself, by his sovereignty over his own life that a man measures himself.
Elie Wiesel
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Will you join me in hearing the case for keeping weapons from those who preach death to Israel and America?
Elie Wiesel
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I cannot cure everybody. I cannot help everybody. But to tell the lonely person that I am not far or different from that lonely person, that I am with him or her, that's all I think we can do and we should do.
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There is a coalition of anti-Semitism today, the extreme left, the extreme right and in the middle the huge corpus of Islam. I'm worried, I go around with a very heavy heart.
Elie Wiesel
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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.
Elie Wiesel
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I make a difference between genocide and Holocaust. Holocaust was mainly Jewish, that was the only people, to the last Jew, sentenced to die for one reason, for being Jewish, that's all.
Elie Wiesel