When I see what is happening all over the world today - the violence - the stupid, arrogant, grotesque violence that is dominating humankind. I cannot not remember that there were other times, of course [the Second World War]. I never compare.

You're at the bottom of the mountain. May you climb up without suffering.

One day - I remember it was a Sabbath afternoon - I came to the synagogue with a book in my hand. I saw a commentary on the Bible by a certain Rabbi Moshe Dessauer, better known as Moses Mendelssohn. An elderly man came up to me - I was then maybe 10 or 12. "What are you studying?" he said. "Dessauer's commentaries," I said. So he gave me a slap on my face.

When I began teaching you hardly could find a university in America or a college where they would teach either Jewish studies or Holocaust studies.

There are moments when I think it will never end, that it will last indefinitely. It's like the rain. Here the rain, like everything else, suggests permanence and eternity. I say to myself: it's raining today and it's going to rain tomorrow and the next day, the next week and the next century.

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.

There are so many who know more than I do, who understand the world better than I do. I would be truly learned, a great scholar, if only I could retain everything I've learned from those I have known. But then would I still be me? And isn't all that only words? Words grow old, too; they change their meaning and their usage. They get sick just as we do; they die of their wounds and then they are relegated to the dust of dictionaries. And where am I in all this?