Elie Wiesel Quotes

Do they see the lethal insanity of a race to the brink of oblivion, and then over the edge? Apparently not. If they did, surely they wouldn't be racing to begin with. Or is it a simple failure of imagination? One doesn't like to think such a rudimentary failing could bring about the end, yet...

Do you think we're going to hit a tipping point and the world's going to end?

If the Russian nuclear arsenal was fired at the United States and other targets, and we fired back at them with thousands of nuclear weapons, it would be the end of life on earth.

If I had to predict, the way things are going, I'd say the chances are about 50-50 that humanity will be extinct or nearly extinct within 50 years. Weapons of mass destruction, disease, I mean this global warming is scaring the living daylights out of me.

She couldn't survey the wreck of the world with an air of casual unconcern.

The world is literally about to blow up.

Nuclear war would really set back cable.

It doesn't take a military genius to see we'll all be crispy critters after World War III.

By the time I'm 50, there is probably going to be a nuclear holocaust. I should just enjoy myself.

Man now has the power to put an end to his own history.

Not only may our own culture be destroyed by these weapons of mass destruction, but all civilizations as they exist in the world may be retarded and weakened for centuries to come. It all adds up to the most dangerous situation that humanity has ever faced in all history

Unless we, who know better than most world citizens the horror of the mushroom cloud that hangs ominously over us, become active Humanists in word and in deed, we may well condemn our world to awake some day never to view again the "green stillness of the country where we can hear the heart of Nature beat," but instead to crawl about and gasp for breath on limited terrain, surrounded by lakes and seas of molten lava, representing the remnants of that which once we knew as Mother Earth.

We turned the switch, saw the flashes, watched for ten minutes, then switched everything off and went home. That night I knew the world was headed for sorrow

The combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons can destroy nations.

There isn’t going to be any learning curve for nuclear weapons. An administration makes one mistake and the result can destroy entire nations.

The thing about the end of the world is that not just the West collapses, the whole world does.

Some people think the world will end in 2012. I think we've got until 2014. I'm an optimist.

We've painted ourselves into a corner where the only choice is real nightmare - triage, epidemic disease, famine, fascism, the collapse of human rights - or a leap to an entirely different level. We've taken business-as-usual off the menu. Now only the extreme possibilities loom.

I don't feel like any of the things we're talking about are going to make the world end.

I will not sleep fine if Donald Trump wins and I will not sleep fine is Hillary Clinton wins. Whether you are looking at nuclear weapons, whether you are looking at expanding wars and their blowback, which will not stop as long as those wars continue to expand, or whether you're looking at the climate, in my view, we have no choice. This is an existential moment. We are deciding not only what kind of world we will have, but whether we will have a world or not. I think it's very important to get outside this box that tells us we are powerless, when in fact, we are powerful.

The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.

The machinery of destruction is complete, poised on a hair trigger, waiting for the 'button' to be 'pushed' by some misguided or deranged human being or for some faulty computer chip to send out the instruction to fire. That so much should be balanced on so fine a point--that the fruit of four and a half billion years can be undone in a careless moment--is a fact against which belief rebels.

One of the dangers [that Donald Trump poses, due to the augmented risk of nuclear war] is unquestionable. Of the two existential threats - the threats to the termination of the species basically and most other species - one of them, climate change, on that I think there's no basis for discussion.

There is no such thing as a survivable or local nuclear war.

I've given up reading the papers. Since the world's so obviously bent on killing itself, I decided months ago to sit back and let it.