The living are more demanding; the dead can wait.
PRIMO LEVIA 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.
More Primo Levi Quotes
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I live in my house as I live inside my skin: I know more beautiful, more ample, more sturdy and more picturesque skins: but it would seem to me unnatural to exchange them for mine.
PRIMO LEVI -
For he who loses all often easily loses himself.
PRIMO LEVI -
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.
PRIMO LEVI -
Anyone who has obeyed nature by transmitting a piece of gossip experiences the explosive relief that accompanies the satisfying of a primary need.
PRIMO LEVI -
In history and in life one sometimes seems to glimpse a ferocious law which states: to he that has, will be given; from he that has not, will be taken away.
PRIMO LEVI -
At the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West-Archimedes and Euclid.
PRIMO LEVI -
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.
PRIMO LEVI -
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.
PRIMO LEVI -
I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself
PRIMO LEVI -
Everybody is somebody’s Jew.
PRIMO LEVI -
More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.
PRIMO LEVI -
If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today?
PRIMO LEVI -
My number is 174517; we have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die.
PRIMO LEVI -
The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to its conclusion by the Germans in defeat.
PRIMO LEVI -
He could hardly read or write but his heart spoke the language of the good
PRIMO LEVI