They sensed that what had happened around them and in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable.
PRIMO LEVIEverybody is somebody’s Jew.
More Primo Levi Quotes
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If a writer is convinced that he is honest, then it is very difficult for him to be a bad writer.
PRIMO LEVI -
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.
PRIMO LEVI -
The problem to be solved, the mystery to be clarified. It is never a matter of civil war; even though of different opinions, or of different political leanings, scientists dispute each other, they compete.
PRIMO LEVI -
We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experience.
PRIMO LEVI -
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
PRIMO LEVI -
We would not think them so beautiful if they did not fly, or if they flew straight and briskly like bees, or if they stung, or above all if they did not enact the perturbing mystery of metamorphosis: the latter assumes in our eyes the value of a badly decoded message, a symbol, a sign.
PRIMO LEVI -
Perhaps Kafka laughed when he told stories [. . . ] because one isn’t always equal to oneself.
PRIMO LEVI -
Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous.
PRIMO LEVI -
We have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone.
PRIMO LEVI -
A man who would mutilate himself is well damned, isn’t he?
PRIMO LEVI -
We 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 LEVI -
There are few men who know how to go to their deaths with dignity, and often they are not those whom one would expect.
PRIMO LEVI -
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.
PRIMO LEVI -
I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day.
PRIMO LEVI -
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.
PRIMO LEVI