Quotes from The Drowned and the Saved

“I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day.”
― Primo Levi, quote from The Drowned and the Saved

“Logic and morality made it impossible to accept an illogical and immoral reality; they engendered a rejection of reality which as a rule led the cultivated man rapidly to despair. But the varieties of the man-animal are innumerable, and I saw and have described men of refined culture, especially if young, throw all this overboard, simplify and barbarize themselves, and survive. A simple man, accustomed not to ask questions of himself, was beyond the reach of the useless torment of asking himself why.

The harsher the oppression, the more widespread among the oppressed is the willingness, with all its infinite nuances and motivations, to collaborate: terror, ideological seduction, servile imitation of the victor, myopic desire for any power whatsoever… Certainly, the greatest responsibility lies with the system, the very structure of the totalitarian state; the concurrent guilt on the part of individual big and small collaborators is always difficult to evaluate… they are the vectors and instruments of the system’s guilt… the room for choices (especially moral choices) was reduced to zero”
― Primo Levi, quote from The Drowned and the Saved

“Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting." by Primo Levi in Drowned”
― Primo Levi, quote from The Drowned and the Saved

“Compassion and brutality can coexist in the same individual and in the same moment...”
― Primo Levi, quote from The Drowned and the Saved

“Se comprendere è impossibile, conoscere è necessario, perché ciò che è accaduto, può ritornare, le coscienze possono nuovamente essere sedotte e oscurate: anche le nostre.”
― Primo Levi, quote from The Drowned and the Saved

“The institution represented an attempt to shift onto others — specifically, the victims — the burden of guilt, so that they were deprived of even the solace of innocence.”
― Primo Levi, quote from The Drowned and the Saved

“If we had to and were able to suffer the sufferings of everyone, we could not live.”
― Primo Levi, quote from The Drowned and the Saved

“Come Rumkowski, anche noi siamo così abbagliati dal potere e dal prestigio da dimenticare la nostra fragilità essenziale: col potere veniamo a patti, volentieri o no, dimenticando che nel ghetto siamo tutti, che il ghetto è cintato, che fuori del recinto stanno i signori della morte, e che poco lontano aspetta il treno.”
― Primo Levi, quote from The Drowned and the Saved

“Suicide is an act of man and not of the animal.”
― Primo Levi, quote from The Drowned and the Saved

“However this war may end, we have won the war against you; none of you will be left to bear witness, but even if some of you survive, the world would not believe him. There will perhaps be suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence together with you. And even if some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed: they will say they are the exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you. We will be the ones to dictate the history of the Lagers." -- SS Officer, quoted in The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi”
― Primo Levi, quote from The Drowned and the Saved

“The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to becomeerased as the years go by, but often they change, or even grow, by incorporating extraneous features. Judges know this very well: almost never do two eyewitnesses of the same event describe it in the same way and with the same words, even if the event is recent and if neither of them has a personal interest in distorting it.”
― Primo Levi, quote from The Drowned and the Saved

“An extreme case of the distortion of the memory of a committed guilty act is found in its suppression. Here, too, the borderline between good and bad faith can be vague; behind the "I don't know" and "I do not remember" that one hears in courtrooms there is sometimes the precise intent to lie, but at other times it is a fossilized lie, rigidified in a formula.”
― Primo Levi, quote from The Drowned and the Saved

“Si può credersi o dichiararsi angosciati per un motivo, ed esserlo per tutt'altro: credere di soffrire davanti al futuro, e soffrire invece per il proprio passato; credere di soffrire per gli altri, per pietà, per com-passione, e soffrire invece per motivi nostri, più o meno profondi, o meno confessabili e confessati; talvolta cosi profondi che solo lo specialista, l'analista delle anime, li sa disseppellire.”
― Primo Levi, quote from The Drowned and the Saved

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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