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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.

Primo Levi

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

Baptized Carry Left My Number Tattoo Until Die
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

Abominable Alchemist Chemistry Hodgepodge Idea Ignorable Instead Interest Language Least Magician Organ Swindles Wuiivocal
If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today?
PRIMO LEVI

Child Eat Give Going Kill Today Tomorrow
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.
PRIMO LEVI

Honest Nothing Probably Said Sue
I 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 LEVI

Beg Cloth Detect Distress Force Greatly Message Reader Search Term
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

Death Dignity Expect Few Know Men Often Whom
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

Carry Impress Leave Must Return Sign Skin Together Will World
He could hardly read or write but his heart spoke the language of the good
PRIMO LEVI

Good Hardly Heart Language Read Spoken
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.
PRIMO LEVI

Ferocious Given Glimpse History Life Sometimes State
Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument.
PRIMO LEVI

Fallacious Human Instrument Marvelous Memory
We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experience.
PRIMO LEVI

Above Beyond Experience Listen Must Personal
Even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization.
PRIMO LEVI

Bear Civilization Even One Ourselves Place Skeleton Story Survive Tell Therefore Want Witness
But 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 LEVI

Acceptance Battle Common DNA Faith Molecular Strong Structure Together Validity
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 LEVI

Everyone Hear Home Refrain Repeated Sanatorium
Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand [the Holocaust] is almost to justify.
PRIMO LEVI

Almost Happened Holocaust Justify More Must One Perhaps Understand
More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.
PRIMO LEVI

Act Ask Believe Dangerous More Question Ready

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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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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