Lipstadt Deborah Quotes & Sayings

In fact, this figure [five million "murdered" Gentiles] is too high if one is counting victims who were targeted exclusively for racial reasons, but too low if one counts the total number of victims the Nazi regime killed outside military operations.
(...)
Wiesenthal's aggrandizement of his role in the Eichmann capture is far less disturbing and historiographically significant than another of his inventions. In an attempt to elicit non-Jewish interest in the Holocaust, Wiesenthal decided to broaden the population of victims - even though it meant falsifying history. He began to speak of eleven million victims: six million Jews and five million non-Jews. Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer immediately recognized that this number made no historical sense. Who, Bauer wondered, constituted Wiesenthal's five million.

--The Eichmann Trial, page 8 — Deborah E. Lipstadt

There's a long tradition - certainly with country, but in all kinds of genres of music - to have humorous lyrics. Certainly with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention and, if you look at country, Roger Miller and Jim Stafford. — Rick Moranis

Wiesenthal admitted to Bauer that he had invented a historical fantasy in order to give the Holocaust a more universal cast and to find a number which was almost as large as the Jewish death toll but not quite equal to it. When Elie Wiesel challenged Wiesenthal to provide some historical proof that five million non-Jews were murdered in the camps, Wiesenthal, rather than admit that he invented the five million number, accused Wiesel of 'Judeocentrism,' being concerned only about Jews.

-- The Eichmann Trial, page 9 — Deborah E. Lipstadt

Although people like Deborah Lipstadt, the Emory University professor who has written and lectured widely on Holocaust denial, have exhorted Jewish parents to just say no to intermarriage, much the way they expect their children not to take drugs, a large majority of parents (and more than a few rabbis) are unable to lay down opposition to intermarriage as a strict operating principle. — Ellen J. McClain

Hearing this, I was reminded of Hajo's comment the previous summer. "People like David Irving do not throw firebombs. They throw the words that can cause others to throw those firebombs. — Deborah E. Lipstadt

A creative, thoughtful, and accomplished people such as the Jewish people should be known by what they have done and not by what has been done to them. — Deborah Lipstadt

Take away from the courts, if it could be taken away, the power to issue injunctions in labor disputes, and it would create a privileged class among the laborers and save the lawless among their number from a most needful remedy available to all men for the protection of their business interests against unlawful invasion ... The secondary boycott is an instrument of tyranny, and ought not to be made legitimate. — William Howard Taft

Books and movies, they are not mere entertainment. They sustain me and help me cope with my real life. — Arlaina Tibensky

The uplifters are forever running around telling blockheads they would do better if they would believe in themselves. But they already do. That is why they are blockheads. — Jack McDevitt

I was attracted to photography because it was technical, full of gadgets, and I was obsessed with science. But at some point around fifteen or sixteen, I had a sense that photography could provide a bridge from the world of science to the world of art, or image. Photography was a means of crossing into a new place I didn't know. — Adam Fuss

When one spends what he has on himselef, when one has a thoroughly good time with his own money, people are apt to say he doesn't know what to do with his money. — Henry Miller

The judges' primary objective was to conduct a scrupulously fair legal proceeding that would win the respect of the world. Hausner's goal was to tell the story of the Holocaust in all its detail, and in so doing, to capture the imagination not just of Israel's youth and world Jewry, but of the entire world .

-- The Eichmann Trial, page 121 — Deborah E. Lipstadt

Leon Wells told of Operation 1005, the group of Jewish prisoners assigned to eradicate the evidence by opening mass graves and exhuming, burning, and pulverizing the bodies.

-- The Eichmann Trial, page 87 — Deborah E. Lipstadt

We are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, and no amount of education gleaned from our propensity for self-destruction and misguided thinking ever teaches us anything. Not anything that we remember for more than a generation or two.
I think maybe we learn a few things each time that we don't forget. A few things that stick with us. It's just hard to pass those things on to those who come after us because if they didn't live through it, they don't view it the same way we do. If you don't experience something firsthand, it's a lot harder to accept. Terry Brooks, Bearers of the Black Staff, p 89 — Terry Brooks

You're a precious treasure and if they are serious about you, let them hunt you and pay the expensive price you deserve to get you. Don't settle for cheap!! — Assegid Habtewold

men weren't worth a damn in combat. They were too weak and too emotional to handle it. She — Simon Cantan

Let us never stop being vigilant about the Oys which face us. But let us never turn them into our raison d'etre. Let us also celebrate the JOYS. — Deborah Lipstadt

Long before Eichmann's capture, Auerbach had conducted research on Operation 1005, the large-scale secret campaign to destroy evidence of the Final Solution by digging up the mass graves, pulverizing the bodies in specially adapted cement-mixer apparatuses, and erasing all traces of the atrocities. She also found two people who had participated as slave laborers in this effort.

-- The Eichmann Trial, page 53 — Deborah E. Lipstadt

There is a psychological dimension to the deniers' and minimizers' objectives: The general public tends to accord victims of genocide a certain moral authority. If you devictimize a people you strip them of their moral authority, and if you can in turn claim to be a victim, as the Poles and Austrians often try to do, that moral authority is conferred on or restored to you.

-- Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, pages 7-8 — Deborah E. Lipstadt

Ultimately, Hausner's efforts regarding the murder were thwarted when questions posed by both Servatius and the judges proved that Avraham Gordon, whom Hausner called as the witness to the murder, could not have observed it.

-- The Eichmann Trial, page 99 — Deborah E. Lipstadt

Some find the overt anti-Semitism of Holocaust deniers the ranting of idiots who are best ignored. Others take these comments quite seriously and see a dire and existential threat to Jewish well-being. They see a Holocaust-denying president of a large country, one that is poised to have nuclear weapons, occupying the podium of a world forum that was founded in the wake of the Final Solution with a mandate to stop genocide. They hear him deny the Final Solution and threaten the existence of the Jewish state.

The Eichmann Trial, page XXVII — Deborah E. Lipstadt

I believe I know the only cure, which is to make one's center of life inside of one's self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity - to decorate one's inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone. — Edith Wharton

'Sblood, you starveling, you elf-skin, you dried neat's tongue, you bull's pizzle, you stock-fish! O for breath to utter what is like thee! you tailor's-yard, you sheath, you bowcase; you vile standing-tuck! — William Shakespeare

At the first Holocaust memorial commemoration in the Capitol Rotunda, both President Jimmy Carter and Vice President Mondale referred to the 'eleven million victims.' Carter also used Wiesenthal's figures of 'six million Jews and five million others' in his Executive Order establishing the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. I have attended Holocaust memorial commemorations in places as diverse as synagogues and army forts where eleven candles were lit. More significant is that strangers have repeatedly taken me and other colleagues to task for ignoring the five million non-Jews. When I explain that this is an invented concept, they become convinced of my ethnocentrism. — Deborah E. Lipstadt

On one occasion, when he was about to be taken from the interrogation room, he thought he was going to be shot. His knees buckled and he cried out in a pleading voice: "I have not told you everything yet".

-- The Eichmann Trial, page 44 — Deborah E. Lipstadt

Iko's hand shot into the air. "Yes, Iko?" "That is the best idea ever. Count me in." Some — Marissa Meyer

At one point Malkin and one of his colleagues took Eichmann to the toilet. They waited outside. After a few minutes, Eichmann called out to Malkin, 'Darf ich anfangen?' ('May I begin?') Only when told yes did he begin to move his bowels.

The Eichmann Trial, page 17 — Deborah E. Lipstadt

Rampton suggested that one could derive a "fair picture of a man's true attitudes and motives from what he says and from the kind of people he associates with and speaks to. — Deborah E. Lipstadt

Deniers build their pseudo-arguments on traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes and imagery. They contend that Jews created the myth of the Holocaust in order to bilk the Germans out of billions of dollars and ensure the establishment of Israel. Once again the devious Jews have harmed innocent multitudes - Germans and Palestinians in particular - for the sake of their own financial and political ends. To someone nurtured by the soil of anti-Semitism, this makes perfect sense.

-- The Eichmann Trial, page xx — Deborah E. Lipstadt

Since my own genome was sequenced, my software has been broadcast into space in the form of electromagnetic waves, carrying my genetic information far beyond Earth. Whether there is any creature out there capable of making sense of the instructions in my genome, well, that's another question. — Craig Venter

If the main thing the next generations know about Jewish history is that we were persecuted and suffered, they will lose sight of the tremendous heritage of Jewish culture, theology, and wisdom. — Deborah Lipstadt

3. There are bears and there are small dogs. Be strong like bear! If they take out your teeth, sit on the dogs. Bears always forget they can just sit on the dogs. Sit on the dogs. — Dave Eggers

Despite its veneer of impartial scholarship, Butz's book is replete with the same expressions of traditional anti-Semitism, philo-Germanism and conspiracy theory as the Holocaust denial pamphlets printed by the most scurrilous neo-Nazi groups.

-- Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, page 126 — Deborah E. Lipstadt

No, Eichmann assured him, there was no specific talk of killing methods.

-- The Eichmann Trial, page 137 — Deborah E. Lipstadt