“Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand [the Holocaust] is almost to justify.”

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.

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.

If a writer is convinced that he is honest, then it is very difficult for him to be a bad writer.

We who survived the Camps are not true witnesses.

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.

My number is 174517; we have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die.

Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument.

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.

The butterfly’s attractiveness derives not only from colors and symmetry: deeper motives contribute to it.

Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.

An enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.

Everybody is somebody’s Jew.

At the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West-Archimedes and Euclid.

I am none of these; I’m a normal man with a good memory who fell into a maelstrom and got out of it more by luck than by virtue, and who from that time on has preserved a certain curiosity about maelstroms large and small, metaphorical and actual.

They sensed that what had happened around them and in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable.

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.

I feel like I wrote that. If I go in there and fix it, it’s almost like something I wrote.

A marriage without conflicts is almost as inconceivable as a nation without crises.

I don’t choose to insulate myself in engaging in real life. Hence, the public kind of almost knows me as much through my real life that they see through the rag mags.

It is almost always a fault of one who loves not to realize when he ceases to be loved.

It costs nothing in money, it is all profit, it completes our education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state of health.

I should say that we are almost indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.

So long as we are loved by others I should say that we are almost indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.

Misery is almost always the result of thinking.