Elie Wiesel

“Mankind must remember that peace is not God's gift to his creatures; peace is our gift to each other.”

“When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity. A person can almost be defined by his or her attitude toward gratitude.”

“I'm a teacher and a writer; my life is words. When I see the denigration of language, it hurts me, and it's easy to denigrate a word by trivializing it.”

“My greatest disappointment is that I believe that those of us who went through the war and tried to write about it, about their experience, became messengers. We have given the message, and...”

“It used to be said that when the Baal Shem Tov came into a town, his impact was so strong, he didn't have to speak. His disciples had to dance or to sing or to preach to have the same effect...”

“I don't like docudramas. Documentaries should not go together with fiction, or half-fiction or quarter-fiction. The two should not go together. They cannot mix.”

“For me, every hour is grace. And I feel gratitude in my heart each time I can meet someone and look at his or her smile.”

“There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are...”

“When my father was born, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. When I was born, it was Lithuania. When I left, it was Hungary. It is difficult to say where I come from.”

“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

“I'll tell you what: I believe mysticism is a very serious endeavor. One must be equipped for it.”

“That is my major preoccupation, memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.”

“Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.”

“Language failed me very often, but then, the substitute for me was silence, but not violence.”

“When language fails, violence becomes a language; I never had that feeling.”

“In any society, fanatics who hate don't hate only me - they hate you, too. They hate everybody.”

“When did I learn the Bible? When I was four or five years old. It's still the pull of my childhood, a fascination with the vanished world, and I can find everything except that world.”

“Religion is a very personal thing for me. Religion has its good moments and its poor moments.”

“When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.”

“Someone who hates one group will end up hating everyone - and, ultimately, hating himself or herself.”