An enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.
PRIMO LEVIDarwin was not afraid to look deeply into the void. His bold view can be seen as either noble and pessimistic or noble and admirable.
More Primo Levi Quotes
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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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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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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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In history and in life one sometimes seems to glimpse a ferocious law which states: to he that has, will be given; from he that has not, will be taken away.
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Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all, at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which masks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.
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At the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West-Archimedes and Euclid.
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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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I’m a libertine, but it’s not my specialty.
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Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often loses himself.
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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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My number is 174517; we have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die.
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Never 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.
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Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that’s why you’re not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not. But immaculate virtue does not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable.
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Nothing 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.
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It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of viciousness, and yet I think it must be done, because what could be perpetrated yesterday could be attempted again tomorrow, could overwhelm us and our children.
PRIMO LEVI