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The philosophers are wrong: it is not words that kill, it is silence.

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
Philosophers
Philosopher
Kill
Silence
Wrong
Words

More quotes by Elie Wiesel

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Terrorism must be outlawed by all civilized nations — not explained or rationalized, but fought and eradicated. Nothing can, nothing will justify the murder of innocent people and helpless children.
Elie Wiesel
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I have tried to keep memory alive... I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.
Elie Wiesel
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The opposite of faith is not heresy but indifference
Elie Wiesel
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I personally have no doubt that the Exodus occurred. How it occurred, I don't know.
Elie Wiesel
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I describe incidents which may or may not have happened but which are true.
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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No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.
Elie Wiesel
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Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered.
Elie Wiesel
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In my tradition, one must wait until one has learned a lot of Bible and Talmud and the Prophets to handle mysticism. This isn't instant coffee. There is no instant mysticism.
Elie Wiesel
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You cross a border and the policeman or the frontier policeman look at you, What are you doing here? Why are you coming? How long will you stay? Well, if I had nearly enough years, I would write a novel about being a refugee.
Elie Wiesel
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There is Israel, for us at least. What no other generation had, we have. We have Israel in spite of all the dangers, the threats and the wars, we have Israel. We can go to Jerusalem. Generations and generations could not and we can.
Elie Wiesel
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Perhaps fate isn't blind after all. Perhaps it's capable of fantasy, even compassion.
Elie Wiesel
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There is one right I would not grant anyone. And that is the right to be indifferent.
Elie Wiesel
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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.
Elie Wiesel
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Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.
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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First we must understand that there can be no life without risk - and when our center is strong, everything else is secondary, even the risks.
Elie Wiesel
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Simply because, one hand, there are the haters, The hater has power. All we can do is oppose it, or one becomes an accomplice.
Elie Wiesel
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Tibet, why is it occupied? For political reasons maybe they have a reason. I don't know. But religiously, why? The fact that the religious community is being oppressed and persecuted is something that every single person in the world who has any religious faith and religious feeling for - for people who have faith should speak up.
Elie Wiesel
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[Shirat ha-Yam ] is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, pieces of Biblical literature that we possess. It is much closer to history than later traditions of the Exodus.
Elie Wiesel