Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.

We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

Mankind must remember that peace is not God's gift to his creatures; peace is our gift to each other.

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

Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.

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

A destruction, an annihilation that only man can provoke, only man can prevent.

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

Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.

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.

For me, every hour is grace. And I feel gratitude in my heart each time I can meet someone and look at his or her smile.

Someone who hates one group will end up hating everyone - and, ultimately, hating himself or herself.

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.

Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.

When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.

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.

It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.

Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.

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

Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.

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

Peace is our gift to each other.

Most people think that shadows follow, precede or surround beings or objects. The truth is that they also surround words, ideas, desires, deeds, impulses and memories.

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

Some stories are true that never happened.

I decided to devote my life to telling the story because I felt that having survived I owe something to the dead. and anyone who does not remember betrays them again.

Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.

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.

After all, God is God because he remembers.

Human beings should be held accountable. Leave God alone. He has enough problems.

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

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.

In any society, fanatics who hate don't hate only me - they hate you, too. They hate everybody.

My greatest disappointment is that I believe that those of us who went through the war and tried to write about it, about their experience, became messengers. We have given the message, and nothing changed.

For me, every hour is grace.

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.

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

Look, if I were alone in the world, I would have the right to choose despair, solitude and self-fulfillment. But I am not alone.

I write to understand as much as to be understood.

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

When language fails, violence becomes a language; I never had that feeling.

In Jewish history there are no coincidences.

It's clear to me that one can't be Jewish without Israel. Religious or non-religious, Zionist or non-Zionist, Ashkenazi or Sephardic - all these will not exist without Israel.

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.

Language failed me very often, but then, the substitute for me was silence, but not violence.

I've given my life to the principle and the ideal of memory, and remembrance.

I will say, with memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful.

In my tradition, one must wait until one has learned a lot of Bible and Talmud and the Prophets to handle mysticism. This isn't instant coffee. There is no instant mysticism.

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.