This I learned in Auschwitz: There are only two races. The race of the decent and the race of the indecent.
- Topic: Society
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from Viktor Frankl
There is nothing in the world that empowers a human being to overcome external difficulties or internal hardships so much as the awareness that one has a task in life.
View your life from your funeral: Looking back at your life experiences, what have you accomplished? What would you have wanted to accomplish but didn't? What were the happy moments? What were the sad? What would you do again, and what wouldn't you do?
When a person can't find a deep meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.
In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.
More on Society
It was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.
Those who would administer wisely must, indeed, be wise, for one of the serious obstacles in the improvement of our race is indiscriminate charity.
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.
The generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.
There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.
Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.
What is not good for the swarm is not good for the bee.
Fundamentally, there are only to ways of coordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion — the technique of the army and the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary cooperation — the technique of the marketplace.
New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.
Don't be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn't do what you do or think as you do or as fast. There is a time when you didn't know what you know today.
If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.
When civil fury first grew high, and men fell out they knew not why.