Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My teachers [ had the most impact in my life]. Of course, my father and grandfather, but after my family, my teachers.
No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
I never felt any attraction towards violence. I never tried to express myself through violence. Violence is a language.
We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else.
Man, as long as he lives, is immortal. One minute before his death he shall be immortal. But one minute later, God wins.
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.
You know how many reasons we have to be desperate and despairing, the world is not learning anything. We have seen that.
Therefore, all my adult life, since I began my life as an author, or as a teacher, I always try to listen to the victim.
Personally, as a student who loves words, who loves texts, I am concerned with finding something in the text from within.
I never compared Nazis into communism, but communism was the same thing, the end justifies the means. Whatever the means.
Just as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live without hope. If dreams reflect the past, hope summons the future.
Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.
From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.
We believed in God, trusted in man, and lived with the illusion that every one of us has been entrusted with a sacred spark.
I remember when I heard the words "Biblical criticism" in my town, it was with disdain: "Biblical criticism? How dare you?".
We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
I believe in God--in spite of God! I believe in Mankind--in spite of Mankind! I believe in the Future--in spite of the Past!
I came to the conclusion that I am free to choose my own suffering. But I am not free to consent to someone else's suffering.
Historically, I come from Jewish history. I had the classic upbringing in the Yeshiva, learning, learning, and more learning.
All I hope is that the American coalition is doing its best to prevent civilian casualties and the killing of innocent people.
It was like a page torn from a history book, from some historical novel about the captivity of babylon or Spanish Inquisition.
Simply because, one hand, there are the haters, The hater has power. All we can do is oppose it, or one becomes an accomplice.
Look, if I were alone in the world, I would have the right to choose despair, solitude and self-fulfillment. But I am not alone.
Words can be turned into spears. They can be turned into prayers. It's a strange world that you are in. But you deal with words.
My students are very special. They are my source of pride, my source of joy, my source of hope. I am terribly fond of my students.
One always goes back to one's childhood in the beginning, and I come from a very religious family and surrounding. Very religious.
For the good of all, I say: Be careful, the brutality of the world must not be more powerful or attractive than love and friendship.
Granted that every war is madness-civil war, fratricide, is the worst of all; it reaches deeper into ugliness, cruelty and absurdity.
Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.
Except if it has some historical meaning for them to have Tibet under their control. I don't understand why [ Chinese] want it so much.
I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes were open and I was alone - terribly alone in a world without God and without (hu)man(ity).
Fanaticism in many lands has surfaced as the greatest threat to the world. Indifference to its consequences would be a serious mistake.
I'm not a political person. I usually beware of political persons. I know many, but I'm not one of them. I have no political ambitions.
The Biblical text does not have punctuation marks like periods and question marks. Where we end sentences is a matter of interpretation.
Man asks and God replies but we don't understand his replies because they dwell in the depths of our souls and remain there until we die.
The more we know, the more pain we have. But because we are human beings, this must be. Otherwise we become objects rather than subjects.
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.
I believe a human being - if he or she wants to remain human, then he or she must do something with what we have seen, endured, witnessed.
Writing is like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate, in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain
You’re shaking … so am I. It’s because of Jerusalem, isn’t it? One doesn’t go to Jerusalem, one returns to it. That’s one of its mysteries.
I have tried to keep memory alive... I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.
Education in the key to preventing the cycle of violence and hatred that marred the 20th century from repeating itself in the 21st century.
That is my major preoccupation, memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.
I was convinced that hatred among nations and among people perished in Auschwitz. It didn't. The victims died but the haters are still here.
This day I ceased to plead. I was no longer capable of lamentation. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused.
More people are aware of the consequences of hatred. People are aware. Therefore more people are engaged in fighting ... racism and so forth.
First we must understand that there can be no life without risk - and when our center is strong, everything else is secondary, even the risks.
What I don't like today is, to put it coarsely, the phony Hasidism, the phony mysticism. Many students say, "Teach me mysticism." It's a joke.
[Adolf] Hitler needed, he didn't want to kill Jews, he wanted to expel German Jews, and therefore it's not entirely corroborating your theory.