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I do not believe in collective guilt.

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
Collectives
Collective
Guilt
Believe

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I had to be honest with myself and that I felt hatred then, but as children say I hate you, it's not really hate, you know, it's anger.
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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.
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did everything I could in my life to be immune to hatred, because hatred is a cancer.
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I have one request: may I never use my reason against truth.
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Judaism is in a sense a Rabbinic, Talmudic religion, rather than a Biblical religion.
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Sometimes I think I prefer the storyteller in [Roman Vishniac] to the photographer. But aren't they one and the same?
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I developed an anger at [Moses] Mendelssohn. Later, I read the book. I realized there was nothing subversive in it.
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I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.
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Life is not a fist. Life is an open hand waiting for some other hand to enter it.
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Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor - never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten.
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Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Whenever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe.
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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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My God was never happiness, but to understand and be understood.
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The story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac are nowhere in any other tradition.
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Only one enemy is worse than despair: indifference. In every area of human creativity, indifference is the enemy indifference of evil is worse than evil, because it is also sterile.
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A word is worth a thousand pictures.
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He explained to me with great insistence that every question posessed a power that did not lie in the answer.
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Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
Elie Wiesel
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A disciple came to the celebrated Master of the Good Name with a question. “Rabbi, how are we to distinguish between a true master and a fake?” And the master of the good name said, “When you meet a person who poses as a master, ask him a question: whether he knows how to purify your thoughts. If he says that he knows, then he is a fake.
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[Tibet] never sought any territory. All it wanted is the conquest of the soul, that people should attain a kind of inner sovereignty, inner independence, inner freedom. And inner strength to attain the absolute.
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