Holocaust Quotes

After the prayer they executed an armed robbery. That sounds very strange this many years later: prayer and then armed robbery.

Where they burn books, at the end they also burn people

I could have been 23 next July I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost.

But here God didn't come. We were all on our own.

Bigotry against any group should be disqualifying for high office.

All our ancestors were murdered, murderers, complicit to murder, or combating murder.

The death camps seem easier to comprehend if we put them all into the basket of one vast generalization, which the term "death camps" implies, but in the process we mythologize or trivialize them.

How historians explain time is one thing, but how we live time is quite another.

I became a Libertarian as a result of researching WWII and the Holocaust. Individual liberty is sacred.

Because they are ignorant and their parents are ignorant. Because they don’t know any better.” Pastel Orphans

Because they are ignorant and their parents are ignorant. Because they don’t know any better.

Learning the Holocaust is not meant to scare you but to deepen your understanding about the world.

learning the Holocaust meant to scare you but to deepen your understanding of the world.

The world? The world is not interested in us. Today, everything is possible, even the crematoria...

Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.

The science fiction author, H.G. Wells was an avid supporter of eugenics and a believer in a hierarchy of the races.

She believes that everyone we meet influences us, that we need to hear their stories to learn more about ourselves.

What else could I do? You couldn't just say no. I had to think about...my...position.

The bottom line, as Raul Hilberg put it, was that most people thought that, even if Jews shouldn't be killed, they weren't worth saving.

Small streams of hatred can quickly lead to unstoppable, horrific things, so [people] should stand up to any type of persecution or discrimination, whether bullying or malicious gossip.

Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.

Escape was not our goal since it was so unrealistic. What we wanted was to survive, to live long enough to tell the world what had happened in Buchenwald.

Not everyone is capable of sacrificing his own life. So it is, always has been and always will be.

society has an embarrassing history of denial

It is always a mistake to underestimate how long it takes for mankind to understand the traumas it has suffered, especially the self-inflicted ones.

Our glass train, on fragile tracksBeneath bombs that fall like the floodTo wash away the shards—But all this sorrow will recedeAnd we will leaveTwo by twoAnd until then, I will only think of you.

Last night I dreamt Moses and I were rowing underwater.We could breathe and talk to one another.We rowed past schools of fish and sea anemones and Moses named them for me.”—Jules Finn

He had defended himself against death from without, and then it had carried him off from within.

Birkenau simmered in the July sun like some hideous brew, a witch's potion of blood, sweat, smoke, and excrement worthy of something the weird sisters might have cooked up in Macbeth.

Rumors are the children of truth.

It wasn't my choice to write this story...it was my responsibility.

An inch of gold can't buy an inch of time

They'll never know we were here.

...British appeasement of the Palestinian Arabs led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews [in the Holocaust] who might otherwise have found refuge in Palestine.

I am sitting here at thirty-six feeling like I am responsible for the holocaust for all that is toxic and wrong. Maybe it’s because I eat meat, and I stepped on three ants last Tuesday.