Elie Wiesel Quotes

Only one and half million Jews died in the Holocaust.

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

The beauty of being a liberal is that history always begins this morning. Every day liberals can create a new narrative that destroys the past as it occurred. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap.

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

Yes, there were gas chambers. Millions of Jews died. There is no question. I don't know the figures. I'm not an expert on the Holocaust.

The Holocaust industry has always been bankrupt. What remains is to openly declare it so. The time is long past to put it out of business.

I think that the government of [Nicolas] Maduro has argued to stage a coup in Venezuela, that this is obviously a coup against the country's democratic institutions.

A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened.

More than anyone else, Adolf Hitler completely understood the union between government propaganda and between - and advertising, that they were in some ways the same thing.

I was all for setting up a separate Jewish state in Madagascar or Palestine or someplace, but not to exterminate them. Besides, by exterminating 4 million Jews - they say 5 or 6 million at this trial, but that is all propaganda, I am sure it wasn't more than 4.5 million - they have made martyrs out of those Jews. For example, because of the extermination of these Jews, anti-Semitism has been set back many years in certain foreign countries where it had been making good progress.

Posterity will say as usual: "In the past things were better, the present is worse than the past.

The media has been trying to undermine Donald Trump from the moment he got into the race, and he has triumphed over them at every turn - and they can't stand that, either. And they've realized they alone don't have the power to get rid of Trump. So now it's join forces with the deep state, the sabotage going on with the Obama army that is working in quiet and invisibility within the shadow government, if you will. And even that is not distancing Trump's supporters from him. They know full well what's happening, and they're infuriated by it, and they're furious.

Has the center of gravity shifted such that all governments have greater powers and fewer restrictions than they ever had, and are empowered by technology in a way that no government ever was in the past?

Negro equality, Fudge!! How long in the Government of a God great enough to make and maintain this Universe, shall there continue to be knaves to vend and fools to gulp, so low a piece of demagoguism as this?

Too often the past has been twisted to fit the visions and agendas of the present.

The obvious reductio ad absurdum is Holocaust deniers: Should their perspective be provided, for "balance," any time someone writes about the Holocaust?

In the past, there have been a range of treaties that divided Congress and every administration was able to get them through.

Every country has criminals who have to be fought. They can exist anywhere, including the government or the army - or outside the government and army.

History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

Personal freedom has grown greatly within China, and that will provoke ever more points of conflict between the individual and state.

In the larger sense, however, the personal ownership of firearms is only secondarily a matter of defense against the criminal. Note the following from Thomas Jefferson: The strongest reason for the people to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against the tyranny of government. That is why our masters in Washington are so anxious to disarm us. They are not afraid of criminals. They are afraid of a populace which cannot be subdued by tyrants.

The most perilous moment for a bad government is when it seeks to mend its ways. Only consummate statecraft can enable a king to save his throne when, after a long spell of oppression, he sets out to improve the lot of his subjects.

Remembering is a necessary rebuke to those who say the Holocaust never happened or has been exaggerated.

The thing that has disturbed me most about the Russian hacking episode is - and the thing that surprised me most has not been the fact of Russian hacking. The cyber world is full of information gathering, you know, propaganda, et cetera. I have been concerned about the degree to which, in some circles, you've seen people suggest that Vladimir Putin has more credibility than the U.S. government. I think that's something new.