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.
PRIMO LEVISooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable.
More Primo Levi Quotes
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It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of viciousness, and yet I think it must be done, because what could be perpetrated yesterday could be attempted again tomorrow, could overwhelm us and our children.
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I’m a libertine, but it’s not my specialty.
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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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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.
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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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My number is 174517; we have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die.
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A scientist’s life, the author says, is indeed conflictual, formed by battles, defeats, and victories: but the adversary is always and only the unknown.
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Perhaps Kafka laughed when he told stories [. . . ] because one isn’t always equal to oneself.
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To give a name to a thing is as gratifying as giving a name to an island, but it is also dangerous: the danger consists in one’s becoming convinced that all is taken care of and that once named, the phenomenon has also been explained.
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More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.
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The sea’s only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong.
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We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless.
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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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There are few men who know how to go to their deaths with dignity, and often they are not those whom one would expect.
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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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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
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I have many times been praised for my lack of animosity towards the Germans. It’s not a philosophical virtue. It’s a habit of having my second reactions before the first.
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There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.
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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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I am constantly amazed by man’s inhumanity to man.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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After the planet becomes theirs, many millions of years will have to pass before a beetle particularly loved by God, at the end of its calculations will find written on a sheet of paper in letters of fire that energy is equal to the mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light.
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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.)
PRIMO LEVI