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He wants to see whether we are capable of overcoming out base instincts, of killing the Satan within ourselves. We have no right to despair. And if he punishes us mercilessly, it is a sign that He loves us that much more.

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
Wants
Satan
Within
Overcoming
Whether
Sign
Right
Instinct
Much
Killing
Mercilessly
Loves
Punishes
Despair
Instincts
Capable
Base

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That is my major preoccupation, memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.
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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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The story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac are nowhere in any other tradition.
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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.
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Granted that every war is madness-civil war, fratricide, is the worst of all it reaches deeper into ugliness, cruelty and absurdity.
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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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In spite of despair, hope must exist. In spite of suffering, humanity must prevail. And in spite of all the differences in the world, the worst enemy, the worst peril, is indifference.
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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.
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No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.
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My God was never happiness, but to understand and be understood.
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What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor, but the silence of the bystander.
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What would the future of man be if it were devoid of memory?
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Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow.
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The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
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Nobody is stronger, nobody is weaker than someone who came back. There is nothing you can do to such a person because whatever you could do is less than what has already been done to him. We have already paid the price.
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Drawn to childhood, the old man will seek it in a thousand different ways.
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I never compared Nazis into communism, but communism was the same thing, the end justifies the means. Whatever the means.
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I'm not a political person. I usually beware of political persons. I know many, but I'm not one of them. I have no political ambitions.
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Will you join me in hearing the case for keeping weapons from those who preach death to Israel and America?
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The darkest days in my life after the war, after the war, was when I discovered that the ... most of the members and commanders of the Einsatz group that were doing the killings, not even in gas chambers, but killing with machine guns, had college degrees from German universities and PhD's and MD's. Couldn't believe it.
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