At the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West-Archimedes and Euclid.
PRIMO LEVIThis is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real.
More Primo Levi Quotes
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Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument.
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A scientist’s life, the author says, is indeed conflictual, formed by battles, defeats, and victories: but the adversary is always and only the unknown.
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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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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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If it is true that there is no greater sorrow than to remember a happy time in a state of misery, it is just as true that calling up a moment of anguish in a tranquil mood, seated quietly at one’s desk, is a source of profound satisfaction.
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It 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.
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I am constantly amazed by man’s inhumanity to man.
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For people of science, he is a hero. Denying man a privileged place in creation, .. he reaffirms with his own intellectual courage the dignity of man.
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He could hardly read or write but his heart spoke the language of the good
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I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day.
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To accuse another of having weak kidneys, lungs, or heart, is not a crime; on the contrary, saying he has a weak brain is a crime.
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An enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.
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We have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone.
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This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real.
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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