Primo Levi Quotes

Perhaps some day someone will explain how, on the level of man, Auschwitz was possible; but on the level of God, it will forever remain the most disturbing of mysteries.

There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.

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.

At Auschwitz, not only man died, but also the idea of man. To live in a world where there is nothing anymore, where the executioner acts as god, as judge-many wanted no part of it. It was its own heart the world incinerated at Auschwitz.

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.

We need creativity. We need more poetry after Auschwitz.

We will not return No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man's presumption made of man in Auschwitz

No matter what I accomplish, it doesn't seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz.

Father God, we just ask You to open Your wide, wide arms and look down upon us, Lord, and lead us, and let us know what we should do to stop this, this terrible, terrible holocaust.

We have lived through the flood time of fascism and of the nazism which ran its meteoric course at a cost to mankind in suffering and waste beyond all computation.

Eighteen months before I was born, my mother was in Auschwitz. She weighed 49 pounds. She always told me that God saved her so she could give me life. I was born out of nothing.

When you think of the sort of things that happen when a genocide happens, it's again not people who are intrinsically evil.

The Holocaust, taken by itself, is a black hole. To look at it directly is to be swallowed up by it.

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?

There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.

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.

No one will ever understand Auschwitz.

The Holocaust remains unique in contemporary Jewish consciousness for its capacity to engender the most visceral grief and abject pain.

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

The hatred and contempt for men, women and children that was manifested in the Shoah was a crime against God and against humanity.

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.

I've been to Dachau.

We are apt to believe in Providence so long as we have our own way; but if things go awry, then we think, if there is a God, he is in heaven, and not on earth.