"Elie Wiesel is living proof that moral outrage at man's inhumanity to man doesn't require rage. There is no loud rhetoric when the 76-year-old Holocaust survivor talks about genocide in Sudan. There is no table pounding when he talks about the world's failure to stop the killing. That, though, is probably what makes his words all the more poignant."

Read his Nobel Peace Prize Lecture

• Elie Wiesel Foundation For Humanity
• Nobel Biography and other information

• The Perils of Indifference: Millenium Lecture at the White House,
  Text and also mp3
• Listen to the Elie Wiesel interview with Don Swaim, 1988
• Academy of Achievement Interview
• Oprah 2000 Interview
• Professor Georg Klein 2004 Interview

Elie Weisel is on the middle midle bunk

• Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Whenever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe.

• The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.

• Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.

• commenting on his first night in Auschwitz, from Night Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

• Always question those who are certain of what they are saying.

• The silence of Birkenau is a silence unlike any other. It contains the screams, the strangled prayers of thousands of human beings condemned to vanish into the darkness of nameless, endless ashes. Human silence at the core of inhumanity. Deadly silence at the core of death. Eternal silence under a moribund sky.

• How can we imagine what is beyond imagination... How can we retell what escapes language?

• To say I want to improve the world would be silly on my part because I know I don't have that power. Only those in power can do something. For me to improve the world is to improve the life of one person. Besides, the the world is little more than an abstraction. What motivates me are the scores of children who die every day because of violence, disease and hunger.