“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.”

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.

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

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.

This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real.

I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself

Everyone dreamed past and future dreams, of slavery and redemption, of improbable paradises, of equally mythical and improbable enemies; cosmic enemies, perverse and subtle, who pervade everything like the air.

Dawn came on us like a betrayer; it seemed as though the new sun rose as an ally of our enemies to assist in our destruction.

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.

I’m a libertine, but it’s not my specialty.

One is tempted to turn away with a grimace and close one’s mind: this is a temptation one must resist.

I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day.

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.

A man who would mutilate himself is well damned, isn’t he?

For people of science, he is a hero. Denying man a privileged place in creation, .. he reaffirms with his own intellectual courage the dignity of man.

Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it.

Each of us bears the imprint of a friend met along the way; In each the trace of each.

It’s in the kitchen that confidences are exchanged, that family life takes place; it’s among the remains of a meal or when your’re elbow-deep in peelings that you ask yourself what life is all about, rather than when you’re sunk in an armchair in the sitting room.

Tanzania being among the highly indebted countries, I had to give sports the least prominence during my first term, while setting priorities in revitalising our economy.

Try hard to be among the few who are chosen. Think of the eternal flames of Hell, and how few there are that are saved.

Misfits aren’t misfits among other misfits.

Racism is, among other things.

There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people.

We are led by the least among us – the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.

But fornication and all uncleanness or covetousness, let it not even be named among you, as is fitting for saints; neither filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor coarse jesting, which are not fitting, but rather giving of thanks.