We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experience.
PRIMO LEVIIt 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.
More Primo Levi Quotes
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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.
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My number is 174517; we have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die.
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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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Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.
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The living are more demanding; the dead can wait.
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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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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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A man who would mutilate himself is well damned, isn’t he?
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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.
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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.
PRIMO LEVI -
I beg the reader not to go in search of messages. It is a term that I detest because it distresses me greatly, for it forces on me clothes that are not mine, which in fact belong to a human type that I distrust; the prophet, the soothsayer, the seer.
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An enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.
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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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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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The principle of order in me, around me, and in the world… I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: “I will understand this, too, I will understand everything.
PRIMO LEVI