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.
PRIMO LEVIThis 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.
More Primo Levi Quotes
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The problem to be solved, the mystery to be clarified. It is never a matter of civil war; even though of different opinions, or of different political leanings, scientists dispute each other, they compete.
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Conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were learning to unravel, was poetry.
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We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless.
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To give a name to a thing is as gratifying as giving a name to an island, but it is also dangerous: the danger consists in one’s becoming convinced that all is taken care of and that once named, the phenomenon has also been explained.
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To be considered stupid and to be told so is more painful than being called gluttonous, mendacious, violent, lascivious, lazy, cowardly: every weakness, every vice, has found its defenders, its rhetoric, its ennoblement and exaltation, but stupidity hasn’t.
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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.
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The living are more demanding; the dead can wait.
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I’m a libertine, but it’s not my specialty.
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More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.
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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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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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If a writer is convinced that he is honest, then it is very difficult for him to be a bad writer.
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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.
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The aims of life are the best defense against death.
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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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For he who loses all often easily loses himself.
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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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It is this refrain that we hear repeated by everyone: you are not at home, this is not a sanatorium, the only exit is by way of the Chimney. (What did it mean? Soon we were all to learn what it meant.)
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One is tempted to turn away with a grimace and close one’s mind: this is a temptation one must resist.
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We have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone.
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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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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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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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We 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
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I am constantly amazed by man’s inhumanity to man.
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The origins of chemistry were ignoble, or at least equivocal: the dens of the alchemists, their abominable hodgepodge of ideas and language, their confessed interest in gold, their Levantine swindles typical of charlatans and magicians; instead.
PRIMO LEVI