It was like a page torn from a history book, from some historical novel about the captivity of babylon or Spanish Inquisition.

In my lifetime I was to write only one book, this would be the one. Just as the past Lingers in the present, all my writings after night, including those that deal with biblical, Talmudic, or Hasidic themes, profoundly bear it's stamp, and cannot be understood if one has not read this very first of my works. Why did I write it? Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of the madness, the immense, terrifying madness that had erupted in history and in the conscience of mankind?

I was convinced that hatred among nations and among people perished in Auschwitz. It didn't. The victims died but the haters are still here.

Today there isn't a university where they don't have special courses [Jewish studies or Holocaust studies], hundreds and hundreds of universities, young people today want to know more than their elders did, much more, and therefore I am very optimistic about young people.

We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else.

A word is worth a thousand pictures.

When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.