Auschwitz quotes:

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Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur. -- Edward Bond
I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. -- David Irving
Humanity's become a product and when humanity is a product, you get Auschwitz and you get Chair. -- Edward Bond
We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning. -- George Steiner
The sad and horrible conclusion is that no one cared that Jews were being murdered... This is the Jewish lesson of the Holocaust and this is the lesson which Auschwitz taught us. -- Ariel Sharon
Sometimes I am asked if I know 'the response to Auschwitz; I answer that not only do I not know it, but that I don't even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has a response. -- Elie Wiesel
I know that elections must be limited only to those who understand that the Arabs are the deadly enemy of the Jewish state, who would bring on us a slow Auschwitz - not with gas, but with knives and hatchets. -- Meir Kahane
Jealousy - the Auschwitz of emotions. -- Christopher Titus
Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. -- Theodor Adorno
There can be no poetry after Auschwitz. -- Theodor Adorno
There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God. -- Primo Levi
Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it. -- Primo Levi
The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference. -- Ian Kershaw
Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake. -- Viktor E. Frankl
What I've learned about comedy people is that they're defined by the harshest level they've been to, their personal Auschwitz. -- Bob Saget
Auschwitz cries out with the pain of immense suffering and pleads for a future of respect, peace and encounter among peoples. -- Pope Francis
Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith. -- W. H. Auden
The West's post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow, and for all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good. -- Philip Gourevitch
Auschwitz exists because of politicized science. -- Michael Crichton
There is no German identity without Auschwitz, -- Joachim Gauck
After Auschwitz, I no longer cry at funerals. -- Charlotte Delbo
There is more to Jewish history than Auschwitz. -- Romain Gary
Every nuclear bomb is an Auschwitz waiting to happen. -- Patricia Marx
I died in Auschwitz, but no one knows it -- Charlotte Delbo
Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped. -- Gunter Grass
People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz. -- Newt Gingrich
Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitz as by Guantanamo Bay. -- Tom Lantos
Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals. -- Theodor Adorno
You'll never get a boyfriend if you look like you wandered out of Auschwitz. -- Helen Fielding
The evidence for man-made global warming is as final as the evidence of Auschwitz. -- Nick Cohen
No matter what I accomplish, it doesn't seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz. -- Art Spiegelman
During the first 3 years at Auschwitz, 2 million people died; over the next 2 years - 3 million. -- Witold Pilecki
The sincere Christian knows that what died in Auschwitz was not the Jewish people but Christianity. -- Elie Wiesel
Auschwitz stands as a tragic reminder of the terrible potential man has for violence and inhumanity. -- Billy Graham
So they didn't let anybody else off. I can't live like this, I'm finished. Auschwitz was easy. -- Witold Pilecki
I was 15, not 14, when I was inside there [Auschwitz], 15, and for me both were actually a surprise. -- Elie Wiesel
So many times I wanted to go to Auschwitz, but I couldn't take up the courage to go there. -- Frank Lowy
Today I think that if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of Providence. -- Primo Levi
During the Nuremberg trials, Oswald Pohl, an SS Lieutenant General,...is shown here explaining how Farben operated such concentration camps as Auschwitz and Buchenwald. -- G. Edward Griffin
I don't think I could ever go to Auschwitz, because when we took that tour of MGM, I nearly collapsed outside the Thalberg building. -- Charles Busch
I was convinced that hatred among nations and among people perished in Auschwitz. It didn't. The victims died but the haters are still here. -- Elie Wiesel
I'd tried to straighten him out, but there's only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer. -- David Sedaris
I prefer a powerful and proud Jewish State that is hated by the entire world than an Auschwitz that is loved by one and all -- Meir Kahane
I've worked with five Presidents in America, all of them I ask the same question always: Why didn't the American allies bomb the railways going to Auschwitz? -- Elie Wiesel
My great lesson from Auschwitz is: whoever wants to dehumanize any other must first be dehumanized himself. The oppressors are no longer really human, whatever uniform they wear. -- Hajo Meyer
What I discovered in Auschwitz is the human condition, the end point of a great adventure, where the European traveler arrived after his two-thousand-year-old moral and cultural history. -- Imre Kertesz
Psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor, Viktor Frankl, stated, "...man is by no means merely a product of heredity and environment. There is a third element: decision. Man ultimately decides for himself! -- Alice A. Kemp
Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible. -- Theodor Adorno
Fifty years after half a million gypsies were exterminated in the Second World War - thousands of them in Auschwitz - we're again preparing the mass killing of this minority. -- Antonio Tabucchi
Perhaps some day someone will explain how, on the level of man, Auschwitz was possible; but on the level of God, it will forever remain the most disturbing of mysteries. -- Elie Wiesel
Racism serves as the cutting edge of the most reactionary movements. An ideology that starts by declaring one human being inferior to another is the slope whose end is at Auschwitz. -- Ken Livingstone
The Holocaust may belong to history, but it was the price we paid to become a nation. Auschwitz was like a cradle of death that enabled future generations of Israelis to live. -- Noa Ben Artzi-Pelossof
There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that? -- Nahum Goldmann
Auschwitz speaks against even a right to self-determination that is enjoyed by all other peoples because one of the preconditions for the horror, besides other, older urges, was a strong and united Germany. -- Gunter Grass
All women are strong. My mother survived Auschwitz, and fear wasn't an option when we were growing up. If we were afraid of the dark, we were put into the closet until we weren't. -- Diane von Furstenberg
I come from a very religious background.And actually I remained in it. All my anger I describe in my quarrels with God in Auschwitz, but you know I used to pray every day. -- Elie Wiesel
Eighteen months before I was born, my mother was in Auschwitz. She weighed 49 pounds. She always told me that God saved her so she could give me life. I was born out of nothing. -- Diane von Furstenberg
We will not return No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man's presumption made of man in Auschwitz -- Primo Levi
The dead of Auschwitz should have brought upon us a total transformation; nothing should have been allowed to remain as it was, neither among our people nor in our churches. Above all, not in the churches. -- Johann Baptist Metz
When I visited Auschwitz I was horrified. And when I visited Iraq, I thought to myself, 'What will we tell our children in fifty years when they ask what we did when the people in Iraq were dying.' -- Mairead Corrigan
I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers. -- Viktor E. Frankl
There is no answer to Auschwitz...To try to answer is to commit a supreme blasphemy. Israel enables us to bear the agony of Auschwitz without radical despair, to sense a ray of God's radiance in the jungles of history. -- Abraham Joshua Heschel
Almost 20 percent of the people living in Germany today have a foreign background. The problem is that Germany can't really offer foreigners an identity because the Germans hardly have a national identity themselves. That is certainly a result of Auschwitz. -- Bassam Tibi
I stated that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are 'among the most unspeakable crimes in history.' I took no position on just where they stand on the scale of horrors relative to Auschwitz, the bombing of Chungking, Lidice, and so on. -- Noam Chomsky
Science is now the craft of the manipulation, substitution and deflection of the forces of nature. What I see coming is a gigantic slaughterhouse, an Auschwitz, in which valuable enzymes, hormones, and so on will be extracted instead of gold teeth. -- Erwin Chargaff
The dismembering of a human being routinely in 30 minutes on an outpatient bases - or any other way - is barbaric. Four blocks from our church all year long - like churches within smelling distance of Auschwitz or Dachau or Buchenwald. -- John Piper
My parents came to this country after World War II, Jews from Czechoslovakia who had survived Auschwitz and Dachau. They settled with my sister in rural Ohio in the 1950s, where my dad became the town doctor and I was born. -- Julie Salamon
It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies. -- Theodor Adorno
The thing about World War II is that everyone knows about the concentration camps in Europe - in Nazi Germany and Poland and Auschwitz and the other camps - but, no one really talks about the camps that were here in the United States. -- Lea Salonga
Ask most kids about details about Auschwitz or about how the American Indians were assassinated as a people and they don't know anything about it. They don't want to know anything. Most people just want their beer or their soap opera or their lullaby. -- Marlon Brando
At Auschwitz, not only man died, but also the idea of man. To live in a world where there is nothing anymore, where the executioner acts as god, as judge-many wanted no part of it. It was its own heart the world incinerated at Auschwitz. -- Elie Wiesel
I work all the time; whatever I do, I do it, and I don't necessarily look at it as work. You could say the Auschwitz project was work, or the Lowy Institute is work, or Westfield is work, or the football is work. It is life. -- Frank Lowy
When we write about Auschwitz, we must know that Auschwitz, in a certain sense at least, suspended literature. One can only write a black novel about Auschwitz or - you should excuse the expression - a cheap serial, which begins in Auschwitz and is still not over. -- Imre Kertesz
None of the participants ever arrived at a clear understanding of the actual horror of Auschwitz, which is of a different nature from all the atrocities of the past, because it appeared to prosecution alike as not much more than the most horrible pogrom in Jewish history. -- Hannah
We cannot get by Auschwitz. We should not even try, as great as the temptation is, because Auschwitz belongs to us, is branded into our history, and - to our benefit! - has made possible an insight that could be summarized as, 'Now we finally know ourselves.' -- Gunter Grass
The Auschwitz praxis was based on a new principle: for one portion of mankind, existence itself is a crime, punishable by humiliation, torture, and death. And the new world produced by this praxis included two kinds of inhabitants, those who were given the "punishment" and those who administered it. -- Emil Fackenheim
Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips. -- Viktor E. Frankl
We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experience, we have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone. It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere. -- Primo Levi
I admit that the generation which produced Stalin, Auschwitz and Hiroshima will take some beating, but the radical and universal consciousness of the death of God is still ahead of us. Perhaps we shall have to colonise the stars before it is finally borne in upon us that God is not out there. -- R. J. Hollingdale
Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite. -- Primo Levi
This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. -- Jacob Bronowski
I was interned in Auschwitz for one year. I didn't bring back anything, except for a few jokes, and that filled me with shame. Then again, I didn't know what to do with this fresh experience. For this experience was no literary awakening, no occasion for professional or artistic introspection. -- Imre Kertesz
The Holocaust survivor who knows Auschwitz through the experience of suffering observes it all from the perspective assigned to him. He keeps silent or gives interviews to the Spielberg Foundation, he accepts the compensation payments promised him after a fifty-year delay, or, if he is prominent, he makes a speech in the Swedish Academy. -- Imre Kertesz
And if the imam and the Muslim leadership in that community is so intent on building bridges, then they should voluntarily move the mosque away from ground zero and move it whether it's uptown or somewhere else, but move it away from that area, the same as the pope directed the Carmelite nuns to move a convent away from Auschwitz. -- Peter T. King

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