If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today?
PRIMO LEVIWe 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
More Primo Levi Quotes
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Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.
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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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After the planet becomes theirs, many millions of years will have to pass before a beetle particularly loved by God, at the end of its calculations will find written on a sheet of paper in letters of fire that energy is equal to the mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light.
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We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experience.
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Man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust.
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Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument.
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To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one: it has not been easy, nor quick, but you Germans have succeeded. Here we are, docile under your gaze; from our side you have nothing more to fear; no acts of violence, no words of defiance, not even a look of judgment.
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Today I think that if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of Providence.
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In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed:.
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What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.
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A man who would mutilate himself is well damned, isn’t he?
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There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.
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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.
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For he who loses all often easily loses himself.
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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.
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Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand [the Holocaust] is almost to justify.
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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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There are few men who know how to go to their deaths with dignity, and often they are not those whom one would expect.
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If it is true that there is no greater sorrow than to remember a happy time in a state of misery, it is just as true that calling up a moment of anguish in a tranquil mood, seated quietly at one’s desk, is a source of profound satisfaction.
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More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.
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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.
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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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The butterfly’s attractiveness derives not only from colors and symmetry: deeper motives contribute to it.
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Nothing can be said: nothing sure, nothing probable, nothing honest. Better to err through omission than through commission: better to refrain from steering the fate of others, since it is already so difficult to navigate one’s own.
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He could hardly read or write but his heart spoke the language of the good
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Each of us bears the imprint of a friend met along the way; In each the trace of each.
PRIMO LEVI