"for the dead and the living, we must bear witness."
— Elie Wiesel

"Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions."
— Primo Levi

"Thou shalt not be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but, above all, thou shalt not be a bystander."
— Yehuda Bauer

"But then what is the alternative to trying to tell the truth about the Holocaust, the Famine, the Armenian genocide, the injustice of dispossession in the Americas and Australia? That everyone should be reduced to silence? To pretend that the Holocaust was the work merely of a well-armed minority who didn’t do as much harm as is claimed-and likewise, to argue that the Irish Famine was either an inevitability or the fault of the Irish-is to say that both were mere unreliable rumors, and not the great motors of history they so obviously proved to be. It suited me to think so at the time, but still I believe it to be true, that if there are going to be areas of history which are off-bounds, then in principle we are reduced to fudging, to cosmetic narrative. "
— Thomas Keneally (Searching for Schindler)

"Part of her revolted against the insanity of the rules. Part of her was grateful. In a world of chaos, any guidelines helped. And she knew that each day she remained alive, she remained alive. One plus one plus one. The Devil's arithmetic..."
— Jane Yolen

"Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that some people survived even as most people died. And can remind us that the swallows still sing around the smokestacks."
— Jane Yolen

"[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 Améry (At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities)

"Time collapsed into a delicate dark pencil brushed against our
eyebrows, the emergent rumble of crowds gathering above our heads. We
slid into our costumes. Pirate, outlaw, futuristic rebels. Red,
purple, gold. Chains hanging from our belts, tight black trousers. We
were moved upstairs, closer to the stage. Finally, we heard the
cannon's roar: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome... Tanzar
recording artists... THE MASTER PLANETS!" The world shot forward. We
stepped into the spotlight."
— Donald Gallinger

"The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history. I mean in this century's history. But we all lived in this century. I didn't live in this century."
— Dan Quayle

"Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that some people survived even as most people died. And can remind us that the swallows still sing around the smokestacks. "
— Jane Yolan