“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.”

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.

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.

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.

Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.

Darwin was not afraid to look deeply into the void. His bold view can be seen as either noble and pessimistic or noble and admirable.

Perhaps Kafka laughed when he told stories [. . . ] because one isn’t always equal to oneself.

The living are more demanding; the dead can wait.

It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of viciousness, and yet I think it must be done, because what could be perpetrated yesterday could be attempted again tomorrow, could overwhelm us and our children.

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

Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand [the Holocaust] is almost to justify.

People think one-point and two-point perspective is how the world actually looks, but of course, it isn’t. It’s a convention.

You can only actually help someone who wants to be helped.

If you actually look at the etymology of the word ‘hallucination’, what it’s come to mean in English is a delusion. But what it really means in the original language is to wander in the mind. That’s the meaning of ‘hallucination’, to wander in the mind.

The things that I have apparently parodied I actually admire.

To realize that all of the last hundred years of economic progress was actually a shell game to create billionaires, while the great masses of people saw their standard of living eroded and destroyed.

So I like the work he’s doing, and I support it, and I realise that he’s one of very few political leaders around the world that actually has early-childhood development strategise at the top of his agenda.

Tories never actually talk about getting rid of their leader, then suddenly there us a flash of steel between he shoulder-blades and rigormortis sets in.

When you relate to thoughts obsessively, you are actually feeding them because thoughts need your attention to survive. Once you begin to pay attention to them and categorize them, then they become very powerful.