The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
It is true that not all the victims were Jews, but all the Jews were victims
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote highlights the universal suffering endured by Jews during the Holocaust, emphasizing their unique victimhood even among other victims.
Elie Wiesel's quote reflects on the tragic experience of the Jewish people during the Holocaust, acknowledging that while there were other victims of the atrocities, every Jew was subjected to persecution and suffering. This statement serves as a poignant reminder of the specific plight of Jews in history, as well as an appeal for recognition of their individual and collective suffering in the face of widespread hatred and violence.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech about tolerance and the importance of remembering history to prevent future atrocities.
More from Elie Wiesel
All quotes →With every cell of my being and with every fiber of my memory I oppose the death penalty in all forms. I do not believe any civilized society should be at the service of death. I don't think it's human to become an agent of the angel of death.
Certain things, certain events, seem inexplicable only for a time: up to the moment when the veil is torn aside.
We're alone, but we are capable of communicating to one another both our loneliness and our desire to break through it. You say, 'I'm alone.' Someone answers, 'I'm alone too.' There's a shift in the scale of power. A bridge is thrown between the two abysses.
No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has escaped the kingdom of night.
My loyalty to my people, to our people, and to Israel comes first and prevents me from saying anything critical of Israel outside Israel… As a Jew I see my role as a melitz yosher, a defender of Israel: I defend even her mistakes… I must identify with whatever Israel does – even with her errors.
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Look at how the British covered India with railroads, and it is easy to view them as modernisers. Look, however, at the abysmal levels of mass illiteracy in the subcontinent they left behind in 1947, and they appear rather differently.
Reconstruction was a vast labor movement of ignorant, muddled, and bewildered white men who had been disinherited of land and labor and fought a long battle with sheer subsistence, hanging on the edge of poverty, eating clay and chasing slaves and now lurching up to manhood.
You gotta understand - the state of Mississippi was in rebellion. It had rebelled against the United States. Now that has been a very difficult story for America to tell, but that's what actually happened.
There's a big mistake that people make with history, which is to think that people in the past were just like us, but wearing crinolines. They lived in different worlds.
Strange as it may seem, George Washington's life has now been so minutely documented that we know far more about him than did his own friends, family, and contemporaries.
I speak for the colored women of the South, because it is there that the millions of blacks in this country have watered the soil with blood and tears, and it is there too that the colored woman of America has made her characteristic history and there her destiny is evolving.