Elie Wiesel

“No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.”

“For me, every hour is grace.”

“What is the difference between Jew and Christians? We all await the Messiah. You believe He has already come and gone, while we do not. I therefore propose that we await Him together. And when He appears, we can ask Him: were You here before?”

“Once you bring life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world.”

“Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only we can give one another.”

“Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.”

“The Bible is not only laws, it's also stories. It begins, 'In the beginning God created Heaven.' If I had written these words, I wouldn't have written anything else; it's just enough.”

“No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.”

“I was very, very religious. And of course I wrote about it in 'Night.' I questioned God's silence. So I questioned. I don't have an answer for that. Does it mean that I stopped having faith? No. I have faith, but I question it.”

“We believed in God, trusted in man, and lived with the illusion that every one of us has been entrusted with a sacred spark.”

“Some stories are true that never happened.”

“I do not recall a Jewish home without a book on the table.”

“I wanted to write a commentary on the Bible, to write about the Talmud, about celebration, about the great eternal subjects: love and happiness.”

“I don't know much about politics, and I don't want to know. That's why I rarely involve myself in politics.”

“I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I've been closer to him for that reason.”

“I never teach the same course twice.”

“For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”

“I would like to see real peace and a state of Israel living peacefully alongside a state of Palestine.”

“Religion is not man's relationship to God, it is man's relationship to man.”

“In the concentration camps, we discovered this whole universe where everyone had his place. The killer came to kill, and the victims came to die.”