A man who would mutilate himself is well damned, isn’t he?
PRIMO LEVIThe future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium.
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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If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today?
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Is anything sadder than a trainThat leaves when it’s supposed to,That has only one voice,Only one route?There’s nothing sadder.Except perhaps a cart horse,Shut between two shaftsAnd unable even to look sideways.
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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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Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument.
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More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.
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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.
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Our ignorance allowed us to live, as you are in the mountains, and your rope is frayed and about to break, but you don’t know it and feel safe.
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Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand [the Holocaust] is almost to justify.
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Today I think that if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of Providence.
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The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.
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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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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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An enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.
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He could hardly read or write but his heart spoke the language of the good
PRIMO LEVI