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.
PRIMO LEVIThere is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.
More Primo Levi Quotes
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Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that’s why you’re not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not. But immaculate virtue does not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable.
PRIMO LEVI -
The living are more demanding; the dead can wait.
PRIMO LEVI -
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.
PRIMO LEVI -
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 LEVI -
We have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone.
PRIMO LEVI -
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.
PRIMO LEVI -
This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real.
PRIMO LEVI -
We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last – the power to refuse our consent.
PRIMO LEVI -
An enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.
PRIMO LEVI -
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 -
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.
PRIMO LEVI -
For he who loses all often easily loses himself.
PRIMO LEVI -
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.
PRIMO LEVI -
A man who would mutilate himself is well damned, isn’t he?
PRIMO LEVI -
Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand [the Holocaust] is almost to justify.
PRIMO LEVI