If a writer is convinced that he is honest, then it is very difficult for him to be a bad writer.
PRIMO LEVIMore dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.
More Primo Levi Quotes
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To be considered stupid and to be told so is more painful than being called gluttonous, mendacious, violent, lascivious, lazy, cowardly: every weakness, every vice, has found its defenders, its rhetoric, its ennoblement and exaltation, but stupidity hasn’t.
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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.
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Darwin was not afraid to look deeply into the void. His bold view can be seen as either noble and pessimistic or noble and admirable.
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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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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.
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The sea’s only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong.
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Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.
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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.
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This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real.
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It is the duty of righteous men to make war on all undeserved privilege, but one must not forget that this is a war without end.
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Did chemistry theorems exist? No: therefore you had to go further, not be satisfied with the quia, go back to the origins, to mathematics and physics.
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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.
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Conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were learning to unravel, was poetry.
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They sensed that what had happened around them and in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable.
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The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite.
PRIMO LEVI