Elie Wiesel Quotes

We used to flock to watch gladiators, public torture and executions. In more recent times, our appetite for mortal violence has been sublimated in sports, photorealistic video games, film and literature.

Football was always a deal we made with ourselves. We adopted it for its brutality, which was embedded in a context that happened to be perfectly suited to television and to gambling, but which we could convince ourselves was only incidental to our enjoyment because it was only incidental to the game itself.

… thrashing a cannibal

Do this research if we don't have a season -- watch how much evil, which we call crime, watch how much crime picks up, if you take away our game.

"Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice." ... They have experienced secretly and privately their natural human impulse toward sadism and brutality... Not merely did I learn to kill with a noose of piano wire put around somebody's neck from behind, but I learned to enjoy the prospect of killing that way.

America's Most Wanted? I love it when there's a guy in the back seat pounding his head on the plexiglas. That to me is the best.

Kill them now, cause I need some kicks. I need some kicks, I'm getting bored.

Opinions which justify cruelty are inspired by cruel impulses.

I was thinking, I could turn him into a fly and drop him into a spider's web and watch him tangled and helpless and struggling, shut into the body of a dying buzzing fly; I could wish him dead until he died.I could fasten him to a tree and keep him there until he grew into the trunk and bark grew over his mouth. if he was under the ground I could walk over him stamping my feet.

The Terrible Truth is that brutality is part of human nature, and all the laws in the world can't neuter it.

Fear cuts deeper than swords.

The lamb misused breeds public strife And yet forgives the butcher's knife.

Man is the cruelest animal.

War: that mad game the world so loves to play.

Years later, I learned an English word for the creature that Assef was, a word for which a good Farsi equivalent does not exist: sociopath.

No wild beasts are so cruel as the Christians in their dealings with each other

It was beautiful in a harsh I'm-going-to-gut-you-like-a-fish kind of way.

She smiles.Her teeth are crooked. If I knocked them out,I might be doing her a favor.

Violence doesn't seem to bother people anymore - they're inured to it. And I think it has a lot to do with the violence in movies and video games - it doesn't bother people as much. I'm not so sure it evokes a reaction anymore.

What mean and cruel things men can do for the love of God.

Violence is not merely killing another. It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person, when we obey because there is fear. So violence isn't merely organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country. Violence is much more subtle, much deeper, and we are inquiring into the very depths of violence.

Why only hate? Where does love remain? Or at least a little decency toward other people? Exactly the same as we behaved against the Jews, we now wish to do against all other people who are in our way, to smash, crush - yes, even exterminate.

It seems that humanity is incapable of putting a halt to the shedding of innocent blood.

I have no patience with people who go around blowing up innocent people.

tell me how does it feel with my teeth in your heart!