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Only the guilty are guilty: the children of killers are not killers, but children.

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
Killers
Guilty
Children

More quotes by Elie Wiesel

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In the face of suffering, one has no right to turn away, not to see. In the face of injustice, one may not look the other way. When someone suffers, and it is not you, that person comes first. One's very suffering gives one priority. . . . To watch over one who grieves is a more urgent duty than to think of God.
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I have a tremendous respect for Professor [Frank Moore] Cross.
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[ Rabbi Shlomo ben Isaac] was the greatest commentator [of the Bible] we ever had.
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They are committing the greatest indignity human beings can inflict on one another: telling people who have suffered excruciating pain and loss that their pain and loss were illusions. (v)
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When I began teaching you hardly could find a university in America or a college where they would teach either Jewish studies or Holocaust studies.
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We didn't really differ [with Frank Moore Cross] because we have the same love of the text. We share that love.
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When I see a child who is hungry, I see a person who is humiliated.
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The Holocaust is a sacred subject. One should take off one's shoes when entering its domain, one should tremble each time one pronounces the word.
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Go over to Greece with the Iliad and Odyssey. These have elements of history, and they have non-historical elements. It's very difficult to pull them apart. And I think there's not much reason to.
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I shall always remember that smile. From what world did it come from?
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I personally have no doubt that the Exodus occurred. How it occurred, I don't know.
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Writers write because they cannot allow the characters that inhabit them to suffocate them. These characters want to get out, to breathe fresh air and partake of the wine of friendship were they to remain locked in, they would forcibly break down the walls. It is they who force the writer to tell their stories.
Elie Wiesel
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The act of writing is for me often nothing more than the secret or conscious desire to carve words on a tombstone: to the memory of a town forever vanished, to the memory of a childhood in exile, to the memory of all those I loved and who, before I could tell them I loved them, went away.
Elie Wiesel
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I don't believe in collective guilt. The children of killers are not killers, but children.
Elie Wiesel
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Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.
Elie Wiesel
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We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.
Elie Wiesel
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Better that one heart be broken a thousand times in the retelling, he has decided, if it means that a thousand other hearts need not be broken at all.
Elie Wiesel
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The Jewish tradition of learning-is learning. Adam chose knowledge instead of immortality.
Elie Wiesel
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The whole community must be saved [in Tibet].
Elie Wiesel
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The opposite of faith is not heresy but indifference
Elie Wiesel