Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand [the Holocaust] is almost to justify.
PRIMO LEVIEach of us bears the imprint of a friend met along the way; In each the trace of each.
More Primo Levi Quotes
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I’m a libertine, but it’s not my specialty.
PRIMO LEVI -
We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experience.
PRIMO LEVI -
Did chemistry theorems exist? No: therefore you had to go further, not be satisfied with the quia, go back to the origins, to mathematics and physics.
PRIMO LEVI -
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.
PRIMO LEVI -
Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.
PRIMO LEVI -
He could hardly read or write but his heart spoke the language of the good
PRIMO LEVI -
We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last – the power to refuse our consent.
PRIMO LEVI -
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.
PRIMO LEVI -
The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite.
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 -
For he who loses all often easily loses himself.
PRIMO LEVI -
Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it.
PRIMO LEVI -
Each of us bears the imprint of a friend met along the way; In each the trace of each.
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 -
Everybody is somebody’s Jew.
PRIMO LEVI