Sandro was surprised when I tried to explain to him some of the ideas — Primo Levi

"I was a chemist in a chemical plant... and I stole in order to eat. If you do not begin as a child, learning how to steal is not easy; it had taken me several months before I could repress the moral commandments and acquired the necessary techniques... I stole everything except the bread of my companions. ...There was a mysterious jar ...It contained ...gray, hard, colorless, odorless, tasteless little rods and did not have a label ...[T]he Russians were a few kilometers away ..; everybody knew the war was about to end: but finally some constants must still subsist, and among them were our hunger ...Alberto took a penknife ...He tried to scrape it ...and saw a spray of yellow sparks ...it was iron-cerium ...from which common flints of cigarette lighters are made. ...Alberto ...explained ...they were mounted on the tips of oxyacetylene torches to ignite the flame. ...Alberto ...did not accept the concentration camp universe ...and miraculously he had remained free ...he had not bowed his head ...I has stolen the : good ...he would turn it into ...an article of high commercial value. Prometheus had been foolish to bestow fire... instead of selling it... the price of a lighter flint was equivalent to a ration of bread... one day of life. ...[I]n two months cerium would have liberated us, an element about which I knew nothing, save ...that it belongs to the equivocal and heretical rare-earth ...family, and that its name has nothing to do with the ...word for wax (cera) and ...it celebrates ...the asteroid Ceres, since the metal and the star were discovered in the same year ...an affectionate-ironic homage to alchemical couplings: just as the Sun was gold and Mars iron, so Ceres must be cerium."

"The trade of chemist (fortified, in my case, by the experience of Auschwitz), teaches you to overcome, indeed to ignore, certain revulsions that are neither necessary or congenital: matter is matter, neither noble nor vile, infinitely transformable, and its proximate origin is of no importance whatsoever. Nitrogen is nitrogen, it passes miraculously from the air into plants, from these into animals, and from animals into us; when its function in our body is exhausted, we eliminate it, but it still remains nitrogen, aseptic, innocent."

"And we must remember that [Hitler and Mussolinis] faithful followers, among them the diligent executors of inhuman orders, were not born torturers, were not (with a few exceptions) monsters: they were ordinary men. Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous; more dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions."

"Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it."

"We who survived the Camps are not true witnesses. We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless."

"The bond between a man and his profession is similar to that which ties him to his country; it is just as complex, often ambivalent, and in general it is understood completely only when it is broken: by exile or emigration in the case of one’s country, by retirement in the case of a trade or profession."

"The wound is the place where the Light enters you."

"Be the change that you wish to see in the world."

"In philosophy equally as in poetry it is the highest and most useful prerogative of genius to produce the strongest impressions of novelty, while it rescues admitted truths from the neglect caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission."

"An [hypertext] encyclopaedia will be an overall attempt by the knowledgeable, the learned societies or anyone else, to represent the state-of-the-art in their field. An encyclopaedia will be a living document, as up to date as it can be, instantly accessible at any time. It will contain carefully authored explanations and summaries of the subject, as well as computer-generated indexes of literature. A reference to a paper from the encyclopaedia conveys authority and acceptance by academic society. A measure of a paper’s standing may be conveyed by the number of links it is away from an encyclopaedia."

"The British intellectual tradition is empirical and liberal, the French is rationalist and aristocratic, and the German is idealist and conservative. ...In the great ontological debate between mind and matter, German philosophy comes down solidly on the side of mind. Its emphasis is intuition as opposed to reason, ideas as opposed to facts."

"To know the mighty works of God, to comprehend His wisdom and majesty and power; to appreciate, in degree, the wonderful workings of His laws, surely all this must be a pleasing and acceptable mode of worship to the Most High, to whom ignorance cannot be more grateful than knowledge."