Imre Kertesz Quotes

Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life.

Passivity is the same as defending injustice.

Nothing exasperates the spirit in man more than power which seems unconquerable and which makes impotent all protest.

I shall not lick the hand besmeared with the blood of my children, sisters, and brothers.

War is the second worst activity of mankind, the worst being acquiescence in slavery.

Violence is totally accepted in this country.

When you grow up Jewish, you are exposed at a very young age to the phenomenon of anti-Semitism and its extreme manifestation in the Holocaust. I spent a lot of time as a little kid wondering how something like that could happen.

I wanted to write something that reflected the violence and horror of the world, but I also wanted to reflect the way people fight to survive, even when society wants to crush them.

Silence is accepting the unacceptable when it comes from anybody.

When one has been threatened with a great injustice, one accepts a smaller as a favour.

Growing up under Saddam's rule, I witnessed many injustices occurring everyday in my country and yet I could not do anything to prevent them.

If you have two groups of people and you say one is inferior to the other, which is a lie, then the only way to maintain the lie is through violence or the threat of violence.

We are a free people; and now you have planted in our country the title deeds of our future slavery. You are neither god nor demon; who are you, then, to make slaves? Orou! You understand the language of these men, tell us all, as you have told me, what they have written on this sheet of metal: This country is ours. This country yours? And why? Because you have walked thereon? If a Tahitian landed one day on your shores, and scratched on one of your rocks or on the bark of your trees: This country belongs to the people of Tahiti - what would you think?

Indifference is an excellent substitute for patience.

It is Toussaint's supreme merit that while he saw European civilisation as a valuable and necessary thing, and strove to lay its foundations among his people, he never had the illusion that it conferred any moral superiority. He knew French, British, and Spanish imperialists for the insatiable gangsters that they were, that there is no oath too sacred for them to break, no crime, deception, treachery, cruelty, destruction of human life and property which they would not commit against those who could not defend themselves.

Persecution is the compliment paid by a threatened lie to a conquering truth.

Life makes no sense if you have to tolerate endless lies. I will never accept this system, which is built on lies, i will not stop my fight against this junta.

How is it possible to live in world where people can rule millions of others? It's incredible! It's like we've gone back to the 12th century. That's what happens when you decapitate intelligentsia and repeatedly traumatize and brutalize a country for decades on end: you do not get virtue. Victims do not make nice people.

Once there was The People - Terror gave it birth.

I'm not going to sit around and be peace and love with somebody's boot on my neck.

All my life I have fought against prejudice and intolerance.

In careless ignorance they think it civilization, when in reality it is a portion of their slavery...To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false pretenses, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

The silent colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples — that is the one to throw bricks and sermons at.

This is what it means to be a slave; to be abused and bear it; compelled by violence to suffer wrong.

Let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle.