Simon Wiesenthal Quotes (38 Quotes)


    He did not want to be buried in Austria, as he was afraid his grave will be mutilated.

    which in no way wanted to distance the Torah observant Jews from the joint club.

    (The ruling is) a victory of history over hate, ... Today's decision definitely places Irving where he belongs -- not as a historian, but as a leading apologist for those who seek to whitewash the most heinous crime in human history.

    For your benefit, learn from our tragedy. It is not a written law that the next victims must be Jews. It can also be other people.

    to expose the plight of black slaves in Sudan and Mauritania, where today tens of thousands of black people still suffer the scourge of slavery.



    We thought we were going mad, ... Perhaps we feared (or hoped) we were mad already.

    deeply hurt because Kreisky and I are leaves of the same tree.

    The schools would fail through their silence, the Church through its forgiveness, and the home through the denial and silence of the parents. The new generation has to hear what the older generation refuses to tell it.

    Discovering witnesses is just as important as catching criminals.

    The combination of hatred and technology is the greatest danger threatening mankind.

    Come, let us do honor to the man who has always honored us.

    For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.

    The end was surely near. The Nazis killed you only when you were naked, because they knew, psychologically, that naked people never resist.

    If all of us forgot, the same thing might happen again, in 20 or 50 or 100 years,

    What connects two thousand years of genocide? Too much power in too few hands.

    Technology without hatred can be a blessing. Technology with hatred is always a disaster.

    Hatred can be nurtured anywhere, idealism can be perverted into sadism anywhere. If hatred and sadism combine with modern technology the inferno could erupt anew anywhere.

    If you know from history the danger, then part of the danger is over because it may not take you by surprise as it did your ancestors.

    I have lost my mother, my father, my five, and ninety relatives in Poland. Poland is for me a cemetery.

    Humour is the weapon of unarmed people: it helps people who are oppressed to smile at the situation that pains them.

    When we come to the other world and meet the millions of Jews who died in the camps and they ask us, 'What have you done' there will be many answers. You will say, 'I became a jeweler.' Another will say, 'I smuggled coffee and American cigarettes.' Another will say, 'I built houses.' But I will say, 'I didn't forget you.'

    Should history repeat itself, my example will repeat itself too...and not once, but fifty-fold.

    For me was the Holocaust not only a Jewish tragedy, but also a human tragedy. After the war, when I saw that the Jews were talking only about the tragedy of six million Jews, I sent letters to Jewish organizations asking them to talk also about the millions of others who were persecuted with us together - many of them only because they helped Jews.

    I know I am not only the bad conscience of the Nazis. I am also the bad conscience of the Jews. Because what I have taken up as my duty was everybody's duty.

    Violence is like a weed - it does not die even in the greatest drought.

    He maintained that his motivation was not anger but justice. I am someone who seeks justice, not revenge, ... My work is a warning to the murderers of tomorrow, that they will never rest.

    When history looks back, I want people to know that the Nazis could not kill millions of people with impunity.

    Survival is a privilege which entails obligations. I am forever asking myself what I can do for those who have not survived.

    Justice for crimes against humanity must have no limitations.

    I was over four years in different camps with people from 15 nations Jews, Gentiles, Gypsies, communists. Through this experience, my view on the Holocaust and the whole problem of Nazism is a lot different from Elie Wiesel, who was only six months in camps and only with Jews.


    I have received many honors in my lifetime, ... When I die, these honors will die with me. But the Simon Wiesenthal Center will live on as my legacy.

    The history of man is the history of crimes, and history can repeat. So information is a defence. Through this we can build, we must build, a defence against repetition.

    There is no denying that Hitler and Stalin are alive today... they are waiting for us to forget, because this is what makes possible the resurrection of these two monsters.

    None of my clients - not Eichmann, not Stangl, not Mengele, and not even Hitler or Stalin - was born a criminal. Somebody had to teach them to hate maybe the society, maybe the politics, maybe just a Jewish prostitute.

    We know that we are not collectively guilty, so how can we accuse any other nation, no matter what some of its people have done, of being collectively guilty?

    Technology without hate can be so beneficial for mankind, but in conjunction with hatred, it leads to disaster.


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