Elie Wiesel Quotes

I don't think Estonians ever really hated Russians. It was more, 'Leave us alone.' We can't change what is past. We can't blame them for what their parents have done. We never hated them. They didn't destroy us that bad.

A thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased.

When you're a kid, what you learn in school about being German has a sort of heaviness about it, and you have a sort of guilt with you.

Germany's historical responsibility will not expire. We want to live up to it - and you should judge us on it.

A lot of people may not read the history of their own country, but they carry on memories transmitted by previous generations. They're trying to achieve something, [they] have their mission and anger -- all this is fed by past experience of history.

Germans have an understanding of history and cannot allow themselves to forget it. It may be a curse, but in some ways, it's a blessing. It makes them cautious.

My individual way of taking on the burdens of history has changed. I don't think of them only as burdens; I think they are honorable.

The application of collective guilt, running from one generation to another, is a dangerous doctrine which would leave few modern nations unscathed.

America is a great country, and we've done a lot of good in the world. But we are a collection of people, not saints. We have our own sins to atone for.

We recall our terrible past so that we can deal with it, to forgive where forgiveness is necessary, without forgetting; to ensure that never again will such inhumanity tear us apart; and to move ourselves to eradicate a legacy that lurks dangerously as a threat to our democracy.

The Germans are prisoners of their past.

I remember as a child of eight being told by a young friend that I had killed Christ. That was news to me. It's a common experience for the Jewish young. Should later generations of Germans be burdened with the guilt arising from the profound inhumanity of their ancestors? Revenge may be sweet, but guilt is non-transferable. Still, hatreds survive with the persistence of cockroaches.

You, the sons and daughters, the future of Turkiye, even under such circumstances and conditions, your duty is to save the Turkish independence and the Republic, you will find the power you need in the noble blood in your veins.

I believe Jews are compassionate people because of what we've suffered. We must not put that suffering onto others.

It will take 150 years or seven generations to heal the wound of the residential school.

We must turn the page on the dark parts of our history.

Our post-war generation were struggling to escape the past and the burden of guilt we carried and to find a new way.

Germany remains among the few countries in Europe to acknowledge, officially and nationally, its responsibility for the crimes it led against our people.

There's the hypothesis that things just keep happening to Russians, things that keep turning them into the same kind of subjects, as opposed to citizens. The more credible hypothesis, I think, is that there is a kind of trauma, a social trauma that is passed on from generation to generation.

We Austrians know that in light of our own history, we have a special responsibility toward Israel and the Jewish people.

We have never owned, as a country, the damage done not only to people who were enslaved but to future generations in which they were treated. I think that has damaged the future of many African-American people. Some have risen above it quite nobly, but it has impacted generations, and we have to be able to own that as part of the past.

History is with us until we learn from the suffering of the past.

Atrocity is recognized as such by victim and predator alike, by all who learn about it at whatever remove. Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating argument. Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself - a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future atrocities thus bred.

We are all the sons or daughters of immigrants - some more recent than others - but all dedicated to the triumph of an idea that serves as the touchstone of what it means to be an American. This America is the only America that we have hitherto known - if being conservative has anything to do with conserving the principles of our past, then no conservative has any business bashing legal immigration.

Sometimes we say we want an end to hate or racism or sexism. But we all participate in keeping these structures alive. If everyone decided to relinquish the past what would happen to people who feel that there hasn't been proper atonement made to them? And what happens to the person who feels that the constant atonement is their identity?