“This cell belongs to a brain, and it is my brain, the brain of me who is writing; and the cell in question, and within it the atom in question, is in charge of my writing, in a gigantic minuscule game which nobody has yet described.”

We who survived the Camps are not true witnesses.

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.

My number is 174517; we have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die.

Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument.

To accuse another of having weak kidneys, lungs, or heart, is not a crime; on the contrary, saying he has a weak brain is a crime.

The butterfly’s attractiveness derives not only from colors and symmetry: deeper motives contribute to it.

Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.

An enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.

Everybody is somebody’s Jew.

At the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West-Archimedes and Euclid.

I am none of these; I’m a normal man with a good memory who fell into a maelstrom and got out of it more by luck than by virtue, and who from that time on has preserved a certain curiosity about maelstroms large and small, metaphorical and actual.

They sensed that what had happened around them and in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable.

In fact, the existence of the death squads had a meaning, a message: ‘We, the master race, are your destroyers, but you are no better than we are; if we so wish, and we do so wish, we can destroy not only your bodies, but also your souls, just as we have destroyed ours.

The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.

Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that’s why you’re not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not. But immaculate virtue does not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable.

Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all, at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which masks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.

Do you know how hard it is to say nothing? When every atom of you strains to do the opposite?

It is the nature of the self to manifest itself, In every atom slumbers the might of the self.

The atom bomb is a paper tiger which the United States reactionaries use to scare people. It looks terrible, but in fact it isn’t.

The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms. But we cannot speak about atoms in ordinary language.

We’re all nothing but unified arrangements of atoms and particles, drifting around.

You sharpen the human appetite to the point where it can split atoms with its desire; you build egos the size of cathedrals; fiber-optically connect the world to every eager impulse.

If you like, there is a Guinness time. The reason for that it’s fundamental. It is not that we have to keep shortening the time. It turns out all molecular and biological systems have speeds of the atoms move inside them.

There is no evil in the atom; only in men’s souls.