Quote

How can one explain the attraction terror holds for some minds — and why for intellectuals? . . .In a totalitarian and terrorist regime, man is no longer a unique being with infinite possibilities and limitless choices but a number, a puppet, with just this difference — numbers and puppets are not susceptible to fear.

Elie Wiesel

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Explain
Susceptible
Longer
Limitless
Numbers
Terror
Regime
Differences
Minds
Regimes
Choices
Infinite
Holds
Puppet
Fear
Unique
Possibilities
Totalitarian
Mind
Number
Attraction
Puppets
Men
Possibility
Terrorist
Intellectuals
Difference

More quotes by Elie Wiesel

Image
We've sort of agreed that the account of Adam and Eve is a story.
Elie Wiesel
Image
I wanted to come back to Sighet to tell you the story of my death. So that you could prepare yourselves while there was still time. To live? I don't attach any importance to my life any more. I'm alone. No, I wanted to come back, and to warn you. And see how it is, no one will listen to me.
Elie Wiesel
Image
None of us is in a position to eliminate war, but it is our obligation to denounce it and expose it in all its hideousness. War leaves no victors, only victims.
Elie Wiesel
Image
For me [Patriarchs] exist. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob exist today. They are people that you see with white beards. I have no doubt of their existence.
Elie Wiesel
Image
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
Image
My faith is a wounded faith, but my life is not without faith. I didn't divorce God, but I'm quarrelling and arguing and questioning, it's a wounded faith.
Elie Wiesel
Image
A man who is fighting for the future of mankind is not waiting for torture, he's waiting for -- the Revolution.
Elie Wiesel
Image
As you know, I describe Shirat ha-Yam as part of an epic story that has qualities of history and which also has qualities of the mythological, of an epic.
Elie Wiesel
Image
When adults wage war, children perish.
Elie Wiesel
Image
I'll tell you what: I believe mysticism is a very serious endeavor. One must be equipped for it.
Elie Wiesel
Image
I've been fighting my entire adult life for men and women everywhere to be equal and to be different. But there is one right I would not grant anyone. And that is the right to be indifferent.
Elie Wiesel
Image
Whatever you think in life... think higher and feel deeper.
Elie Wiesel
Image
I thought that culture and education are the shield. An educated person cannot do certain things and, and be educated, you cannot, and there they were, killing children day after day.
Elie Wiesel
Image
You know, words have strange destiny, too. They grow. They get old. They die. They come back.
Elie Wiesel
Image
I'd rather speak as a student of philosophy. Philosophically it makes no sense, absolutely makes no sense. Why should people inherit evil things when their memories could contain and should invoke good things?
Elie Wiesel
Image
Fanaticism in many lands has surfaced as the greatest threat to the world. Indifference to its consequences would be a serious mistake.
Elie Wiesel
Image
Every moment contains a spark of eternity.
Elie Wiesel
Image
I've organised for the last years, since I got the Nobel Prize actually, Anatomy of Hate Conferences all over the world, what is hate. Didn't help but at least they explored it.
Elie Wiesel
Image
I did not weep, and it pained me that i could not weep. But I had no more tears. And, in the depths of my being, in the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched it, I might perhaps have found something like--free at last!
Elie Wiesel
Image
The only place where I felt at home, on familiar ground, was the Jewish cemetery. And yet I had never set foot in it before. Children had been forbidden to enter.
Elie Wiesel