Elie Wiesel
Elie Wiesel
Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel KBEwas a Romanian-born American Jewish writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor. He was the author of 57 books, written mostly in French and English, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionActivist
Date of Birth30 September 1928
CountryUnited States of America
past want my-past
I don't want my past to become anyone else's future.
children believe school
I believe that all the survivors are mad. One time or another their madness will explode. You cannot absorb that much madness and not be influenced by it. That is why the children of survivors are so tragic. I see them in school. They don't know how
teaching college america
When I began teaching you hardly could find a university in America or a college where they would teach either Jewish studies or Holocaust studies.
writing musical needs
I listen to music when I write. I need the musical background. Classical music. I'm behind the times. I'm still with Baroque music, Gregorian chant, the requiems, and with the quartets of Beethoven and Brahms. That is what I need for the climate, for the surroundings, for the landscape: the music.
integrity differences making-a-difference
One person of integrity can make a difference.
night body soup
Bread, soup - these were my whole life. I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time.
mean junk students
I don't see the junk youth. I only meet students, and even those who are not formally at the university, if they come to listen to me, they come to read me, it means they are not junk students.
freedom philosophy military
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
mean communism nazi
I never compared Nazis into communism, but communism was the same thing, the end justifies the means. Whatever the means.
death attitude indifference
Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.
real teaching thinking
I don't know the real answer, my answer to anything which is essentially human relations is education. Whatever the answer is, education must be its measured component and if you try to educate with generosity not with triumphalism I think sometimes it works, especially young people, that's why I teach, I've been teaching all my life.
dream heart past
Just as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live without hope. If dreams reflect the past, hope summons the future.
children hate hatred
I had to be honest with myself and that I felt hatred then, but as children say "I hate you", it's not really hate, you know, it's anger.
mean heart broken
Better that one heart be broken a thousand times in the retelling, he has decided, if it means that a thousand other hearts need not be broken at all.