Simon Wiesenthal's Quotes

For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.

Humour is the weapon of unarmed people: it helps people who are oppressed to smile at the situation that pains them.

The schools would fail through their silence, the Church through its forgiveness, and the home through the denial and silence of the parents. The new generation has to hear what the older generation refuses to tell it.

Justice for crimes against humanity must have no limitations.

The history of man is the history of crimes, and history can repeat. So information is a defence. Through this we can build, we must build, a defence against repetition.

There is no denying that Hitler and Stalin are alive today... they are waiting for us to forget, because this is what makes possible the resurrection of these two monsters.

God must have been on leave during the Holocaust.

For your benefit, learn from our tragedy. It is not a written law that the next victims must be Jews. It can also be other people.

Survival is a privilege which entails obligations. I am forever asking myself what I can do for those who have not survived.

Technology without hatred can be a blessing. Technology with hatred is always a disaster.

The end was surely near. The Nazis killed you only when you were naked, because they knew, psychologically, that naked people never resist.

Violence is like a weed - it does not die even in the greatest drought.

Discovering witnesses is just as important as catching criminals.

The combination of hatred and technology is the greatest danger threatening mankind.

What connects two thousand years of genocide? Too much power in too few hands.

When history looks back, I want people to know that the Nazis could not kill millions of people with impunity.

I know I am not only the bad conscience of the Nazis. I am also the bad conscience of the Jews. Because what I have taken up as my duty was everybody's duty.

We know that we are not collectively guilty, so how can we accuse any other nation, no matter what some of its people have done, of being collectively guilty?