“There are few men who know how to go to their deaths with dignity, and often they are not those whom one would expect.”

The origins of chemistry were ignoble, or at least equivocal: the dens of the alchemists, their abominable hodgepodge of ideas and language, their confessed interest in gold, their Levantine swindles typical of charlatans and magicians; instead.

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

But they do not battle: they are bound together by a strong alliance, by the common faith “in the validity of Maxwell’s or Boltzmann’s equations,” and by the common acceptance of Darwinism and the molecular structure of DNA.

This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real.

I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself

Everyone dreamed past and future dreams, of slavery and redemption, of improbable paradises, of equally mythical and improbable enemies; cosmic enemies, perverse and subtle, who pervade everything like the air.

Dawn came on us like a betrayer; it seemed as though the new sun rose as an ally of our enemies to assist in our destruction.

In history and in life one sometimes seems to glimpse a ferocious law which states: to he that has, will be given; from he that has not, will be taken away.

I’m a libertine, but it’s not my specialty.

One is tempted to turn away with a grimace and close one’s mind: this is a temptation one must resist.

I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day.

I beg the reader not to go in search of messages. It is a term that I detest because it distresses me greatly, for it forces on me clothes that are not mine, which in fact belong to a human type that I distrust; the prophet, the soothsayer, the seer.

A man who would mutilate himself is well damned, isn’t he?

For people of science, he is a hero. Denying man a privileged place in creation, .. he reaffirms with his own intellectual courage the dignity of man.

Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it.

Each of us bears the imprint of a friend met along the way; In each the trace of each.

The flat shoe makes the woman equal of men. When they have high [shoes], they play a part like a geisha, and they can’t be expected to be taken that seriously.

A good soldier, whether he leads a platoon or an army, is expected to look backward as well as forward; but he must think only forward.

What man thinks of changing himself so as to suit his wife? And yet men expect that women shall put on altogether new characters when they are married, and girls think that they can do so.

An astronomer must be cosmopolitan, because ignorant statesmen cannot be expected to value their services

I promise to keep on living as though I expected to live forever. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old only be deserting their ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up interest wrinkles the soul.

It’s been a journey, the NBA. It’s taken me a lot farther than I ever expected.

Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power.

How can you expect to be rescued if you don’t put first things first and act proper?