There are few men who know how to go to their deaths with dignity, and often they are not those whom one would expect.
PRIMO LEVIFor 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.
More Primo Levi Quotes
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It is the duty of righteous men to make war on all undeserved privilege, but one must not forget that this is a war without end.
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If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today?
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Conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were learning to unravel, was poetry.
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We who survived the Camps are not true witnesses.
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He could hardly read or write but his heart spoke the language of the good
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The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to its conclusion by the Germans in defeat.
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Never again could it be cleansed; it would prove that man, the human species – we, in short – had the potential to construct an enormity of pain, and that pain is the only force created from nothing, without cost and without effort. It is enough not to see, not to listen, not to act.
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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.
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I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day.
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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.
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Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.
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This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real.
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We collected in a group in front of their door, and we experienced within ourselves a grief that was new for us, the ancient grief of the people that has no land, the grief without hope of the exodus which is renewed in every century.
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Did chemistry theorems exist? No: therefore you had to go further, not be satisfied with the quia, go back to the origins, to mathematics and physics.
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There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.
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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.
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Our ignorance allowed us to live, as you are in the mountains, and your rope is frayed and about to break, but you don’t know it and feel safe.
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Is anything sadder than a trainThat leaves when it’s supposed to,That has only one voice,Only one route?There’s nothing sadder.Except perhaps a cart horse,Shut between two shaftsAnd unable even to look sideways.
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They sensed that what had happened around them and in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable.
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I have many times been praised for my lack of animosity towards the Germans. It’s not a philosophical virtue. It’s a habit of having my second reactions before the first.
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I am constantly amazed by man’s inhumanity to man.
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Even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization.
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A scientist’s life, the author says, is indeed conflictual, formed by battles, defeats, and victories: but the adversary is always and only the unknown.
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Everybody is somebody’s Jew.
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A man who would mutilate himself is well damned, isn’t he?
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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