Quotes about Holocaust

You can say "This is a bad comic." You can't say "This is bad because it's a comic."

[REGARDING CATHOLIC CHURCH OFFICIALLY ASSISTING NAZIS IN TRACKING AND COLLECTING JEWS]
Daniel Goldhagen

... Goldhagen also reminds us that not a single German Catholic was excommunicated before, during, or after the war, “after committing crimes as great as any in human history.”  This is really an extraordinary fact.  Throughout this period, the church continued to excommunicate theologians and scholars in droves for holding unorthodox views and to proscribe books by the hundreds, and yet not a single perpetrator of genocide – of whom there were countless examples – succeeded in furrowing Pope Pius XII’s censorious brow.

Dachau is left standing because it must be. All the Dachaus -- all the Belsens, all the Buchenwalds, all the Auschwitzes -- all of it. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge...but worst of all, their consciences. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to think about, something to dwell on and remember...not only in the Twilight Zone, but wherever men walk God's Earth.

Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.

Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart.

Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor's sake.

Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.

She told me there was a reason God had taken the young man, his corpse riddled with 15 stab wounds and 83 bullets. I told her "There is a reason indeed. Same way as there was a reason 12 million Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Gays Handicapped and others died back during World War II. A whole lotta good men did exactly what they are doing now. You don’t know what that is? Exactly.You would know if they were."

The question to ask should not be: Do we have something in commong - reason, self-consciousness, a soul - with other animals? (With the corollary that, if we do not, then we are entitled to treat them as we like, imprisoning them, killing them, dishonoring there corpses).  I return to the death camps, the horror that convinces us that what went on there was a crime against humanity, is not that despite a humanity shared with their victims, the killers treated them like lice.  That is too abstract.  The horror is that the killers refused to see themselves in the place of their victims, as did everyone else.  They said 'It is they in those cattle-cars rattling past.' They did not say, 'How would it be if it were I in that cattle-car?' They did not say, 'It is I who am in that cattle-car,' They said, "It must be the dead who are being burnt today, making the air stink and falling ash on my cabbages.' They did not say, 'How would it be if I were burning?' They did not say, 'I am burning, I am falling in ash.'  In other words, they closed their hearts.

Is it not late?  A late time to be living?  Are not our generations the crucial ones?  For we have changed the world.  Are not our heightened times the important ones?  For we have nuclear bombs.  Are we not especially significant because our century is? - our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes?  No, we are not and it is not.  These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other.  Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it?...
Take away the bomb threat and what are we?  Ordinary beads on a never-ending string.  Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn...
There must be something heroic about our time, something that lifts it above all those other times.  Plague?  Funny weather?  Dire things are happening...
Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news?  Only to enforce our fancy - probably a necessary lie - that these are crucial times, and we are in on them.  Newly revealed, and we are in the know: crazy people, bunches of them.  New diseases, shifts in power, floods!  Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different?

Son of man, keep not silent, forget not deeds of tyranny. Cry out at the disaster of a people, recount it unto your children and they unto theirs. From generation to generation the hordes swept in, ran wild and savage and there was no deliverance, valiance, and revolt. How the mighty are fallen, the great in spirit and stout of heart, walking to their death with a halo of eternity. (reference to the Holocaust)

Better contraceptives will control population only if people will use them. A nuclear holocaust can be prevented only if the conditions under which nations make war can be changed. The environment will continue to deteriorate until pollution practices are abandoned. We need to make vast changes in human behavior.