Primo Levi Quotes About Auschwitz

Quotes about: Auschwitz

• Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it. Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all, at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which masks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.

  Primo Levi

  Country, Roots, Air

• Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.

  Primo Levi

  Would Be, Deny, Remakes

  Interview with Daniel Toaff, "Sorgenti di Vita", translated by Mirto Stone, March 25, 1983.

• We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experience, we have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone. 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

  Events, Fundamentals, Unexpected

• Sooner 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. 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.

  Primo Levi

  Later In Life, Perfect, Joy

  Primo Levi (1996). “Survival In Auschwitz”, p.17, Simon and Schuster

• There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.

  Primo Levi

  Atheist, Auschwitz

  "Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life by Berel Lang - review" by Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. February 2, 2014.

• 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

  Primo Levi

  Men, Evil, Skins

  Primo Levi (1996). “Survival In Auschwitz”, p.55, Simon and Schuster

• Today I think that if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of Providence.

  Primo Levi

  Thinking, Age, Today

  Survival in Auschwitz ch. 17 (1960) (translation by Stuart Woolf )

• The trade of chemist (fortified, in my case, by the experience of Auschwitz), teaches you to overcome, indeed to ignore, certain revulsions that are neither necessary or congenital: matter is matter, neither noble nor vile, infinitely transformable, and its proximate origin is of no importance whatsoever. Nitrogen is nitrogen, it passes miraculously from the air into plants, from these into animals, and from animals into us; when its function in our body is exhausted, we eliminate it, but it still remains nitrogen, aseptic, innocent.

  Primo Levi

  Animal, Air, Overcoming

  Primo Levi (1995). “The Periodic Table”

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