Elie Wiesel Quotes

There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.

Today I think that if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of Providence.

Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.

Sometimes I am asked if I know 'the response to Auschwitz; I answer that not only do I not know it, but that I don't even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has a response.

God must have been on leave during the Holocaust.

Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.

World War II proves there's no God.

This actual question of 'Why does God allow war?' is not considered or raised as such in the Bible at all.

What I'm trying to say is the Holocaust was a horrific crime against humanity and frankly, I would never want to see that repeated.

Do freshman philosophy classes nowadays debate updated versions of the age-old questions? Like, how could a merciful God allow AIDS, childhood cancers, tsunamis and Dick Cheney?

Auschwitz will forever remain the black hole of the entire human history.

He has more of a right to ask us why so many people are starving [than we do to ask Him]. As much as we want God to explain himself to us, His creation, we are in no place to demand that He give an account to us.

But there's something about the simplicity of Auschwitz... there's just nothing. There's just photographs, there's a room full of limbs, a room full of hair, and then you go into the place where the gas chambers were. You walk down these halls and the efficiency of it is so inhuman. The place is so powerful, just for its utter bald, bare simplicity.

Whenever there is a catastrophe, some religious people inevitably ask, 'Why didn't God do something? Where was God when all those people died?'

The problem of suffering is: why is there the suffering we know?

If I had to imagine omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent power in the universe that chose to make my mother suffer, I don't know how I would make that make sense in the universe.

I was born into an Irish Catholic family in the New York area in this great, wonderful, and safe country, but the Holocaust has always haunted me, and it has long stood as a stumbling block to faith. How could such a thing be? How is that consistent with the concept of a loving God?

Almost every time I am in a lectureship on a college campus, young people will say, If there is a God and if he is a loving and merciful God, how do you explain the problems of suffering and death and all the tragedies that happen to people?

We often represent God to ourselves as being able to draw from non-being a world without sorrows, faults, dangers - a world in which there is no damage, no breakage. This is a conceptual fantasy and makes it impossible to solve the problem of evil.

I was never much bothered about moral questions like, 'How could there be a good God when there's so much evil in the world?'

Man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.

People ask why God allows suffering. You could just as well ask the Minister of Transport why he allows accidents on Britain's roads.

I believe for God not to allow pain to happen in the world is for Him to extract free will from the world.

There is no answer to Auschwitz...To try to answer is to commit a supreme blasphemy. Israel enables us to bear the agony of Auschwitz without radical despair, to sense a ray of God's radiance in the jungles of history.

The Holocaust is not a cheap soap opera. The Holocaust is not a romantic novel. It is something else.