Shoah Holocaust Quotes & Sayings

True happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the first place, in the enjoyment of one's self, and, in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions. — Joseph Addison

The task of understanding the past is neverending. — Susanna Moore

If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it. — David Foster Wallace

If you are a denier, get on the right side of history and stop being so gullible. Remember, it has been historically and scientifically proven, in a court of law no less, that more than 1.2 million Jews, along with 20,000 gypsies and tens of thousands of Polish and Russian political prisoners, were killed at Auschwitz alone. Beyond that, Yad Vashem's Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names has collected 4.5 million Jewish victims' names (and counting) from various archival sources. How much more evidence could you possibly want? — James Morcan

I guess there is nothing that will get your mind off everything like golf. I have never been depressed enough to take up the game, but they say you get so sore at yourself you forget to hate your enemies. — Will Rogers

[F]or me, being a Jew means feeling the tragedy of yesterday as an inner oppression. On my left forearm I bear the Auschwitz number; it reads more briefly than the Pentateuch or the Talmud and yet provides more thorough information. It is also more binding than basic formulas of Jewish existence. If to myself and the world, including the religious and nationally minded Jews, who do not regard me as one of their own, I say: I am a Jew, then I mean by that those realities and possibilities that are summed up in the Auschwitz number. — Jean Amery

I made it easier for many artists to play in certain areas. — Norman Granz

Laugh till you're exhausted. — Naguib Mahfouz

My rabbis taught me that it was wrong to say God caused the Holocaust; that he simply, in 1938, turned His head. He looked away. — Shalom Auslander

Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying. — Simone De Beauvoir

I am very skinny. — Novak Djokovic

My novella, 'The Lucky One,' is inspired in part by my dad and also by a Holocaust survivor I interviewed for the Steven Spielberg Survivors of the Shoah Foundation. — Jenna Blum

Society likes to file you away, put you in this or that category. And I never fit any category. Maybe that's why I was left out of a lot of things, or why my work was not really understood, because there was no precedent for it. — Agnes Denes

The family has always been the cornerstone of American society. Our families nurture, preserve, and pass on to each succeeding generation the values we share and cherish, values that are the foundation of our freedoms. — Ronald Reagan

But doing 'Parenthood,' I've never ever been happier in 35 years. I drive to work and I drive home. I'm like a factory worker and that is in my DNA. I love having a steady job with the same people. It's made me so much calmer and more content. Now I just hope the series goes on for 15 years. — Dax Shepard

So yesterday the high-ranking visitors came after all. . . H[immler} at their head. A slight, insignificant-looking little man, with a rather good-humored face. High peaked cap, mustache, and small spectacles. I think: If you wanted to trace back all the misery and horror to just one person, it would have to be him. Around him a lot of fellows with weary faces. Very big, heavily dressed men, they swerve along whichever way he turns, like a swarm of flies, changing places among themselves (they don't stand still for a moment) and moving like a single whole. It makes a fatally alarming impression. (January 30, 1944) — David Koker

Edward Progers was his Majesty's Page of the Backstairs. He handled private money transactions, secret correspondence, and served in an ex-officio capacity as the King's pimp. It was a position of no mean prestige, and of considerable activity. — Kathleen Winsor

The revolt against individualism naturally calls artists severely to account, because the artist is of all men the most individual; those who were not have been long forgotten. — Willa Cather

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. — Victoria J. Barnett

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

When my father died, I had millions of people supporting me in a very, very difficult time. I have received so much from this country. I realize that we're defined in life not by what we get from this world but by what we have to offer it, and I know that I have a lot to offer this country, and I'm serious about devoting my life to it. — Justin Trudeau

I can't recite the chronology or elaborate on the facts. I can't explain the reasons or defend how we lived our lives. What I can tell you is how the events of 1933 sowed the seeds that fundamentally changed our future, that there was little hand-wringing or emotion, that circumstances were beyond control, that there was no recourse or appeal. I can tell you that events were incremental, that the unbelievable became the believable and, ultimately, the normal.

Ralph Webster, A Smile in One Eye: a Tear in the Other — Ralph Webster

The Nazis understand everything except humour. — Mary Berg

The the Shoah involved millions of people, it was a unique experience for each of them. — Ruth Kluger