Simon Wiesenthal Quotes

We seem to live in a world where forgetting and oblivion are an industry in themselves and very, very few people are remotely interested or aware of their own recent history, much less their neighbors'. I tend to think we are what we remember, what we know. The less we remember, the less we know about ourselves, the less we are. (Interview with Three Monkeys Online, October 2008)

I don't think you can erase history.

Those who cannot condemn the past repeat it in order to remember it.

Without knowing your own history, you are doomed to repeat it.

Why are some things remembered and others forgotten? That is the theme I want to pursue about the Second World War.

If you don't remember history accurately, how can you learn?

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.

Time is passing...yet for the United States of America, there will be no forgetting September the 11th.

What is memory but the repository of things doomed to be forgotten, so you must have History. You must have labor to invent History. Being faithful to all that happens to you of significance, recording days, dates, events, names, sights not relying merely upon memory which fades like a Polaroid print where you see the memory fading before your eyes like time itself retreating.

If we forget our past, we won't remember our future and it will be as well because we won't have one.

Wars come and wars go but the world does not change: it will always forget an indebtedness which it thinks it expedient not to remember.

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was... The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

How do you commemorate a year? A paper anniversary, but we are the words written down, not the paper.

If you encounter a human shadow burned permanently into the concrete in Hiroshima, you realize that this is the trace of a very ordinary person now elevated into the emblematic. Time, shame, complicity, or discomfort are the only things that make us pretend History is impersonal or far removed from the power and consequences of our every lived moment.

A nation that forgets its past has no future.

He who forgets will be destined to remember.

People have forgotten the effects of prohibition. We have become the United Statesof Amnesia.

Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, "just in case," in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep.

I was looking at the photographs and I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories.

If we seek to keep the past alive, we end, I think, by distorting it.

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work- I am the grass; I cover all. And pile them high at Gettysburg. And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. Shovel them under and let me work. Two years, ten years,and passengers ask the conductor- What place is this? Where are we now? I am the grass. Let me work.

I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past. I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past after all is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me.

How many times have I been in my therapist's office, saying, "I think I'm smarter than this! I've been down this road! I've learned this lesson!" And she's like, "Yeah, and you're learning it a little bit deeper."