“We have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone.”

The new kings of the world will live tranquilly for a long time, confining themselves to devouring each other and being parasites among each other on a cottage industry scale.

A country is considered the more civilised the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak and a powerful one too powerful.

If a writer is convinced that he is honest, then it is very difficult for him to be a bad writer.

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.

I never met anyone who didn’t have a very smart child. What happens to these children, you wonder, when they reach adulthood?

I can take more punishment than anyone in the business.

Never give anyone the advice to buy or sell shares, because the most benevolent price of advice can turn out badly.

However greatly we distrust the sincerity of those we converse with, yet still we think they tell more truth to us than to anyone else.

Perfect valour consists in doing without witnesses that which we would be capable of doing before everyone.

How can we expect another to keep our secret if we have been unable to keep it ourselves?

Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.

Bohr’s influence on the physics and the physicists of our century was stronger than that of anyone else, even than that of Albert Einstein.