Best 12 quotes of Tadeusz Borowski on MyQuotes

And I think about my cell at the Pawiak prison. During the first week I felt I would not be able to endure a day without a book, without the circle of light under the parafin lamp in the evening, without a sheet of paper, without you. . . .

Between two throw-ins in a soccer game, right behind my back, three thousand people had been put to death.

I risked my life to save lives. I'm not looking for glory. I just want people to know the truth about what happened.

I smile and I think that one human being must always be discovering another - through love. And that this is the most important thing on earth, and the most lasting.

It is the camp law: people going to their death must be deceived to the very end. This is the only permissible form of charity.

neither poems nor prose just a length of rope just the wet earth -- that's the way home. neither vodka nor bread just bursts of rage just more new graves -- that's youth and that's love. neither sleep nor waking neither joy nor laughter just tears in the night -- so the rope, paper, knife.

Real hunger is when one man regards another man as something to eat.

There can be no beauty if it is paid for by human injustice, nor truth that passes over injustice in silence, nor moral virtue that condones it.

The world is ruled by neither justice nor morality; crime is not punished nor virtue rewarded, one is forgotten as quickly as the other. The world is ruled by power and power is obtained with money. To work is senseless, because money cannot be obtained through work, but through exploitation of others. And if we cannot exploit as much as we wish, at least let us work as little as we can. Moral duty? We believe neither in the morality of man nor in the morality of systems. [p. 168]

I think that for those who have suffered unjustly, justice alone is not enough. They want the guilty to suffer unjustly too. Only this will they understand as justice.

It is the camp law: people going to their death must be deceived to the very end.

We are laying the foundation for some new, monstrous civilization. Only now do I realize what price was paid for building the ancient civilizations. The Egyptian pyramids, the temples and Greek statues—what a hideous crime they were! How much blood must have poured on to the Roman roads, the bulwarks, and the city walls. Antiquity—the tremendous concentration camp where the slave was branded on the forehead by his master, and crucified for trying to escape! Antiquity—the conspiracy of the free men against the slaves! .... If the Germans win the war, what will the world know about us? They will erect huge buildings, highways, factories, soaring monuments. Our hands will be placed under every brick, and our backs will carry the steel rails and the slabs of concrete. They will kill off our families, our sick, our aged. They will murder our children. And we shall be forgotten, drowned out by the voices of the poets, the jurists, the philosophers, the priests. They will produce their own beauty, virtue, and truth. They will produce religion.