Elie Wiesel
Elie Wiesel
Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel KBEwas a Romanian-born American Jewish writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor. He was the author of 57 books, written mostly in French and English, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionActivist
Date of Birth30 September 1928
CountryUnited States of America
holocaust would-be forget
To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.
memories people holocaust
I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory.
fighting men waiting
A man who is fighting for the future of mankind is not waiting for torture, he's waiting for -- the Revolution.
faith religious race
No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.
gratitude grateful missing
When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.
thinking vocabulary people
I was involved in trying to save the Rwandan people and Sudan now. It's a mass murder. Mass murder is a terrifying word. We don't have to go further than that. Cambodia came close to, but what was it, Cambodians killing Cambodians after all. So therefore I think we should be very careful with vocabulary.
beautiful quests beautiful-words
In the word question, there is a beautiful word - quest. I love that word.
past want my-past
I don't want my past to become anyone else's future.
children believe school
I believe that all the survivors are mad. One time or another their madness will explode. You cannot absorb that much madness and not be influenced by it. That is why the children of survivors are so tragic. I see them in school. They don't know how
teaching college america
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.
writing musical needs
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.
integrity differences making-a-difference
One person of integrity can make a difference.
night body soup
Bread, soup - these were my whole life. I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time.
mean junk students
I don't see the junk youth. I only meet students, and even those who are not formally at the university, if they come to listen to me, they come to read me, it means they are not junk students.