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.)
PRIMO LEVIIt 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.)
PRIMO LEVII’m a libertine, but it’s not my specialty.
PRIMO LEVIAt the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West-Archimedes and Euclid.
PRIMO LEVIWe 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
PRIMO LEVIWe collected in a group in front of their door, and we experienced within ourselves a grief that was new for us, the ancient grief of the people that has no land, the grief without hope of the exodus which is renewed in every century.
PRIMO LEVII 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.
PRIMO LEVIThe 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 LEVIWe who survived the Camps are not true witnesses.
PRIMO LEVIIt happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.
PRIMO LEVINothing can be said: nothing sure, nothing probable, nothing honest. Better to err through omission than through commission: better to refrain from steering the fate of others, since it is already so difficult to navigate one’s own.
PRIMO LEVIIf a writer is convinced that he is honest, then it is very difficult for him to be a bad writer.
PRIMO LEVIThere is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.
PRIMO LEVINever again could it be cleansed; it would prove that man, the human species – we, in short – had the potential to construct an enormity of pain, and that pain is the only force created from nothing, without cost and without effort. It is enough not to see, not to listen, not to act.
PRIMO LEVIIf you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today?
PRIMO LEVIBut 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.
PRIMO LEVIOne is tempted to turn away with a grimace and close one’s mind: this is a temptation one must resist.
PRIMO LEVI