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I have one request: may I never use my reason against truth.

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
May
Reason
Never
Request
Education
Use
Truth

More quotes by Elie Wiesel

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Everybody around us was weeping. Someone began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don't know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves.
Elie Wiesel
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I'm not a military man. I wish I were, then maybe I could give some advice.
Elie Wiesel
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For me democracy is the only way of life. The opposite is dictatorship or anarchy.
Elie Wiesel
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I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.
Elie Wiesel
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I was 15, not 14, when I was inside there [Auschwitz], 15, and for me both were actually a surprise.
Elie Wiesel
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I don't speak about my pain. My pain is something that doesn't need to be purged. I want to prevent people from suffering. I don't speak about my suffering. Suffering is something personal and discreet. Also, I know it will never leave me. I don't want it to leave me. It would be a betrayal.
Elie Wiesel
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Some of the men spoke of God: His mysterious ways, the sins of the Jewish people, and the redemption to come. As for me, I had ceased to pray. I concurred with Job! I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice.
Elie Wiesel
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No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.
Elie Wiesel
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I came to the conclusion that I am free to choose my own suffering. But I am not free to consent to someone else's suffering.
Elie Wiesel
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The opposite of faith is not heresy but indifference
Elie Wiesel
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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
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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.
Elie Wiesel
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I was there when God was put on trial....At the end of the trial, they used the word chayav, rather than 'guilty'. It means 'He owes us something'. Then we went to pray.
Elie Wiesel
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I've worked with five Presidents in America, all of them I ask the same question always: Why didn't the American allies bomb the railways going to Auschwitz?
Elie Wiesel
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It is up to us to determine whether the years ahead will be for humankind a curse or a blessing. We always must remember that it is given to men and women to choose life and living, not death and destruction.
Elie Wiesel
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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
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Fanaticism in many lands has surfaced as the greatest threat to the world. Indifference to its consequences would be a serious mistake.
Elie Wiesel
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If the Book of the Law could be forgotten for so many years, who knows what was done to it during those years? Maybe it was lost later, too. And another one replaced it, and that one is no longer the original text. These are questions that perturb me much more than whether it's history or not history.
Elie Wiesel
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People become the stories they hear and the stories they tell.
Elie Wiesel
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What would the future of man be if it were devoid of memory?
Elie Wiesel