Great Throughts Treasury

"Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life."

"Peace is our gift to each other."

"Simply because, one hand, there are the haters... The hater has power. ... All we can do is oppose it, or one becomes an accomplice."

"That is my major preoccupation /memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it."

"That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS."

"Some stories are true that never happened."

"The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, and so are you."

"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."

"The doors were nailed up; the way back was finally cut off. The world was a cattle wagon hermetically sealed."

"The night was gone. The morning star was shining in the sky. I too had become a completely different person. The student of the Talmud, the child that I was, had been consumed in the flames. There remained only a shape that looked like me. A dark flame had entered into my soul and devoured it."

"Terrorism knows no borders. Therefore, opposition to terrorism must know no borders."

"Suffering pulls us farther away from other human beings. It builds a wall made of cries and contempt to separate us."

"The ghetto was not guarded. One could enter and leave as one pleased. Maria, our former maid, came to see us. Sobbing, she begged us to come with her to her village where she had prepared a safe shelter. My father wouldn’t hear of it. He told me and my big sisters, If you wish, go there. I shall stay here with your mother and the little one… Naturally, we refused to be separated."

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, but indifference between life and death."

"The sky is so close to the sea that it is difficult to tell which is reflected in the other, which one needs the other, which one is dominating the other."

"The yellow star? Oh well, what of it? You don't die of it."

"Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing... And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished. Behind me, I heard the same man asking: For God's sake, where is God? And from within me, I heard a voice answer: Where He is? This is where--hanging here from this gallows... That night, the soup tasted of corpses."

"There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win."

"The world? The world is not interested in us. Today, everything is possible, even the crematoria..."

"There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them."

"There is divine beauty in learning, just as there is human beauty in tolerance. To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps. The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, their quests. And so are you."

"There's a long road of suffering ahead of you. But don't lose courage. You've already escaped the gravest danger: selection. So now, muster your strength, and don't lose heart. We shall all see the day of liberation. Have faith in life. Above all else, have faith. Drive out despair, and you will keep death away from yourselves. Hell is not for eternity. And now, a prayer - or rather, a piece of advice: let there be comradeship among you. We are all brothers, and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive."

"They are committing the greatest indignity human beings can inflict on one another: telling people who have suffered excruciating pain and loss that their pain and loss were illusions."

"Think higher, feel deeper."

"There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest. The Talmud tells us that by saving a single human being, man can save the world."

"Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow."

"This is the duty of our generation as we enter the twenty-first century -- solidarity with the weak, the persecuted, the lonely, the sick, and those in despair. It is expressed by the desire to give a noble and humanizing meaning to a community in which all members will define themselves not by their own identity but by that of others."

"To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time."

"To remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all."

"Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself."

"Waking among the dead, one wondered if one was still alive. And yet real despair only seized us later. Afterwards. As we emerged from the nightmare and began to search for meaning."

"Usu­al­ly, very ear­ly in the morn­ing. Ger­man la­bor­ers were go­ing to work. They would stop and look at us with­out sur­prise. One day when we had come to a stop, a work­er took a piece of bread out of his bag and threw it in­to a wag­on. There was a stam­pede. Dozens of starv­ing men fought des­per­ate­ly over a few crumbs. The work­er watched the spec­ta­cle with great interest. Years later, I witnessed a sim­ilar spec­ta­cle in Aden. Our ship’s pas­sen­gers amused them­selves by throw­ing coins to the natives, who dove to retrieve them. An el­egant Parisian la­dy took great plea­sure in this game. When I no­ticed two chil­dren des­perate­ly fighting in the wa­ter, one try­ing to stran­gle the oth­er, I implored the la­dy: Please, don’t throw any more coins! Why not? said she. I like to give char­ity…"

"We are here to let the Jewish state and its brave, beleaguered citizens and its valiant soldiers know that they are not alone."

"We are still here. And no matter what, we shall continue to be here to tell people so they can learn from our history."

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

"We are all brothers and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive."

"We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else."

"We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them. Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately."

"We cannot indefinitely avoid depressing subject matter, particularly if it is true, and in the subsequent quarter century the world has had to hear a story it would have preferred not to hear - the story of how a cultured people turned to genocide, and how the rest of the world, also composed of cultured people, remained silent in the face of genocide."

"We thought it would be enough to tell of the tidal wave of hatred which broke over the Jewish people for men everywhere to decide once and for all to put an end to hatred of anyone who is different — whether black or white, Jew or Arab, Christian or Moslem — anyone whose orientation differs politically, philosophically, sexually."

"We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph."

"We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe."

"We were masters of nature, masters of the world. We had forgotten everything--death, fatigue, our natural needs. Stronger than cold or hunger, stronger than the shots and the desire to die, condemned and wandering, mere numbers, we were the only men on earth."

"What can we expect? It's war..."

"We tried. It was not easy. At first, because of the language; language failed us. We would have to invent a new vocabulary, for our own words were inadequate, anemic. And then too, the people around us refused to listen; and even those who listened refused to believe; and even those who believed could not comprehend. Of course they could not. Nobody could. The experience of the camps defies comprehension."

"What does mysticism really mean? It means the way to attain knowledge. It's close to philosophy, except in philosophy you go horizontally while in mysticism you go vertically."

"What I don't like today is, to put it coarsely, the phony Hasidism, the phony mysticism. Many students say, "Teach me mysticism." It's a joke."

"We were all going to die here. All limits had been passed. No one had any strength left. And again the night would be long."

"What is abnormal is that I am normal. That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life — that is what is abnormal."

"When a person doesn’t have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity. A person can almost be defined by his or her attitude toward gratitude."