Elie Wiesel Quotes

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

I've always hated oppression.

The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.

You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can't jail the Revolution.

The price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that someday they might force their beliefs on us.

Hatred is corrosive of a person's wisdom and conscience; the mentality of enmity can poison a nation's spirit, instigate brutal life and death struggles, destroy a society's tolerance and humanity, and block a nation's progress to freedom and democracy.

I keep attacking the villains, the know-nothings, the people who want to take our freedoms away.

A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure.

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives.

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

Some people still believe you should just fall in line with what's going on - and that's scary. It makes a mockery of freedom of speech.

One of the most important functions of jazz has been to encourage a hope for freedom, for people living in situations of intolerance or struggle.

Till people find themselves greatly abused and oppressed by their governors, they are not apt to complain; and whenever they do, in fact, find themselves thus abused and oppressed, they must be stupid not to complain.

Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.

A man can submit today in order to resist tomorrow. My submission had been such. And because I had not been free to show my real feeling, to voice my true thoughts, my submission had bred bitterness and anger. And there were nearly ten million others who had submitted with equal anger and bitterness.

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long.

Even rats can only be kicked around for so long before they've had enough.

When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete.

The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head.

Denounce me for advocating freedom if you can, and I will bear your curse with a better resignation.

The seed of revolution is repression.

They are against nature and the principles of liberty

Suppression? Persecution? The revolution was fought for this?

England may as well dam up the waters of the Nile with bulrushes as to fetter the step of Freedom

If officials are too forceful, people will revolt.