{"author":"Primo Levi","author_id":"Primo+Levi","total_quotes":27,"quotes":[{"text":"I am constantly amazed by man's inhumanity to man.","author":"Primo Levi","tags":["inhumanity","mankind"],"id":1373,"author_id":"Primo+Levi"},{"text":"Compassion and brutality can coexist in the same individual and in the same moment...","author":"Primo Levi","tags":["brutality","compassion","human-nature","primo-levi","the-drowned-and-the-saved"],"id":10865,"author_id":"Primo+Levi"},{"text":"If we had to and were able to suffer the sufferings of everyone, we could not live.","author":"Primo Levi","tags":["compassion","human-nature","primo-levi","suffering","the-drown-and-the-saved"],"id":10879,"author_id":"Primo+Levi"},{"text":"They are the typical product of the structure of the German Lager: if one offers a position of privilege to a few individuals in a state of slavery, exacting in exchange the betrayal of a natural solidarity with theircomrades, there will certainly be someone who will accept. He will be withdrawn from the common law and will become untouchable; the more power that he is given, the more he will be consequently hateful andhated. When he is given the command of a group of unfortunates, with the right of life or death over them, he will be cruel and tyrannical, because he will understand that if he is not sufficiently so, someone else, judged more suitable, will take over his post.Moreover, his capacity for hatred, unfulfilled in the direction of the oppressors, will double back, beyond all reason, on the oppressed; and he will only be satisfied when he has unloaded onto his underlings the injury received from above.","author":"Primo Levi","tags":["auschwitz","corruption","if this is a man","politics","power","primo-levi","the-holocaust","the-truce","wwii"],"id":18415,"author_id":"Primo+Levi"},{"text":"An extreme case of the distortion of the memory of a committed guilty act is found in its suppression. Here, too, the borderline between good and bad faith can be vague; behind the 'I don't know' and 'I do not remember' that one hears in courtrooms there is sometimes the precise intent to lie, but at other times it is a fossilized lie, rigidified in a formula.","author":"Primo Levi","tags":["lie"],"id":35713,"author_id":"Primo+Levi"},{"text":"This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real. Everyone dreamed past and future dreams, of slavery and redemption, of improbable paradises, of equally mythical and improbable enemies; cosmic enemies, perverse and subtle, who pervade everything like the air.","author":"Primo Levi","tags":["dreams","exile","prisoner"],"id":64589,"author_id":"Primo+Levi"},{"text":"The conviction that life has a purpose is rooted in every fibre of man, it is a property of the human substance. Free men give many names to this purpose, and think and talk a lot about its nature. But for us the question is simpler. Today, in this place, our only purpose is to reach the spring. At the moment we care about nothing else. Behind this aim there is not at the moment any other aim. In the morning while we wait endlessly lined up in roll-call square for the time to leave for work, while every breath of wind penetrates our clothes and runs in violent shivers over our defenceless bodies, and everything is grey around us, and we are grey; in the morning, when it is still dark, we all look at the sky in the east to spot the first signs of a milder season, and the rising of the sun is commented on every day: today a little earlier than yesterday, today a little warmer than yesterday, in two months, in a month, the cold will call a truce and we will have one enemy less. Today the sun rose bright and clear for the first time from the horizon of mud. It is a Polish sun, cold, white, distant, and only warms the skin, but when it dissolved the last mists a murmur ran through our colourless numbers, and when even I felt its lukewarmth through my clothes I understood how men can worship the sun.","author":"Primo Levi","tags":["cold","holocaust","light","purpose-of-life","seasons","spring","sun","sun-worship","survival","warmth"],"id":66338,"author_id":"Primo+Levi"},{"text":"Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.","author":"Primo Levi","tags":["common-men","danger","existence","holocaust","monsters","questions"],"id":69930,"author_id":"Primo+Levi"},{"text":"Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.","author":"Primo Levi","tags":["memories","memory","lie "],"id":83819,"author_id":"Primo+Levi"},{"text":"We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last - the power to refuse our consent. So we must certainly wash our faces without soap in dirty water and dry ourselves on our jackets. We must polish our shoes, not because the regulation states it, but for dignity and propriety. We must walk erect, without dragging our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive, not to begin to die.","author":"Primo Levi","tags":["defiance","dignity","holocaust-literature","resistance","survival"],"id":112905,"author_id":"Primo+Levi"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":27,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}