Top 50 Antonio Iturbe Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Brave people are not the ones who aren’t afraid. Those are reckless people who ignore the risk; they put themselves and others in danger. That’s not the sort of person I want on my team. I need the ones who know the risk – whose legs shake, but carry on.”

— Antonio Iturbe

2. “But those who believe that flowers grow in vases don’t understand anything about literature. The library has now become her first-aid kit, and she’s going to give the children a little of the medicine that helped her recover her smile when she thought she’d lost it forever.”

— Antonio Iturbe

3. “Throughout history, all dictators, tyrants, and oppressors, whatever their ideology – whether Aryan, African, Asian, Arab, Slav, or any other racial background; whether defenders of popular revolutions, or the privileges of the upper classes, or God’s mandate, or martial law – have had one thing in common: the vicious persecution of the written word. Books are extremely dangerous; they make people think.”

— Antonio Iturbe

4. “History will teach Mengele a lesson. That the greatest weakness of all is precisely that of the strong: They end up believing they are invincible. So the strength of the Third Reich is also its fragility. Believing it is indestructible, it will open so many battlefronts that it will end up collapsing.”

— Antonio Iturbe

5. “Life, any life, is very short. But if you’ve managed to be happy for at least an instant, it will have been worth living.”

— Antonio Iturbe

6. “In a place like Auschwitz, where everything is designed to make you cry, a smile is an act of defiance.”

— Antonio Iturbe

7. “Within their pages, books contain the wisdom of the people who wrote them. Books never lose their memory.”

— Antonio Iturbe

8. “A book is like a trapdoor that leads to a secret attic: You can open it and go inside. And your world is different.”

— Antonio Iturbe

9. “Literature has the same impact as a match lit in the middle of a field in the middle of the night. The match illuminates relatively little, but it enables us to see how much darkness surrounds it.”

— Antonio Iturbe

10. “Books are extremely dangerous; they make people think.”

— Antonio Iturbe

11. “The most beautiful flowers emerge from the foulest dung heap. So maybe, thinks Dita, God isn’t a watchmaker but a gardener.”

— Antonio Iturbe

12. “War is like an overflowing river: It’s hard to control and, if you put up a small barrier, it only gets swept along in its path.”

— Antonio Iturbe

13. “The strongest athlete isn’t the one who finishes first. That athlete is the fastest. The strongest athlete is the one who gets up again every time he falls, the one who doesn’t stop when he feels a pain in his side, the one who doesn’t abandon the race, no matter how far away the finish line is. That runner is a winner whenever he reaches the finish line, even if he comes in last.”

— Antonio Iturbe

14. “It doesn’t matter how many schools the Nazis close, he would say to them. Each time someone stops to tell a story and children listen, a school has been established.”

— Antonio Iturbe

15. “A person waiting for you somewhere is like a match you strike at night in the couuntryside. It may not be able to light up everything, but it does show you the way back home.”

— Antonio Iturbe

16. “Each time someone stops to tell a story and children listen, a school has been established.”

— Antonio Iturbe

17. “We’re stronger than them because our hearts are stronger. We’re better than them because our hearts are more powerful.”

— Antonio Iturbe

18. “After the jubilation of victory and the celebrations marking the end of the war, after the dances organized by the Allied forces and the pompous speeches, postwar reality shows itself for what it is: mute, harsh, and without fanfare... The reality behind peace is that in front of her is a country in ruins.”

— Antonio Iturbe

19. “Starting a book is like boarding a train to go on holiday.”

— Antonio Iturbe

20. “Adults wear themselves out pointlessly searching for a joy they never find. But in children, it bursts out of every pore.”

— Antonio Iturbe

21. “She smiles again at the thought of all those pages. Since then, she has discovered that her life can be made much more profound, because books multiply your experiences and enable you to meet people...”

— Antonio Iturbe

22. “Apathy is the worst possible situation.”

— Antonio Iturbe

23. “But hate is too much like love: Neither of them is a matter of choice.”

— Antonio Iturbe

24. “It’s easy to commend the hero whose actions are visible. But how do you measure the bravery of those who step aside?”

— Antonio Iturbe

25. “The real disease is intolerance.”

— Antonio Iturbe

26. “Adults are corrupted. That’s why young people are so important. You can still shape them, improve them.”

— Antonio Iturbe

27. “He knew better than anyone that Communism was a beautiful path that ended at a precipice.”

— Antonio Iturbe

28. “It was during one of her many sleepless nights that Dita came up with the idea of turning her memories into photos and her head into the only album that nobody would ever be able to take away from her.”

— Antonio Iturbe

29. “Those who go no longer suffer, but no one knows how much suffering still awaits those left behind.”

— Antonio Iturbe

30. “Brave people are not the ones who aren’t afraid. Those are reckless people who ignore the risk; they put themselves and others in danger. They are the ones who know the risk – whose legs shake, but who carry on. Brave people are the ones who can overcome their own fear.”

— Antonio Iturbe

31. “But those who believe that flowers grow in vases don’t understand anything about literature.”

— Antonio Iturbe

32. “When a dog barks fiercely at someone, or even bites them, it does it out of fear, not hate. If you ever have to confront an aggressive dog, don’t run or shout, because you’ll frighten it and it will bite you. Stand still and talk to it slowly so it becomes less scared.”

— Antonio Iturbe

33. “It’s no crime. The real disease is intolerance.”

— Antonio Iturbe

34. “But wherein lies the danger, there too grows the saving power.”

— Antonio Iturbe

35. “A cry for peace shouted as loudly as possible in the biggest factory of death of all time.”

— Antonio Iturbe

36. “An animal that doesn’t know it’s going to the slaughterhouse allows itself to be led there much more docilely than one that knows it’s going to be sacrificed and thus puts up all kinds of resistance.”

— Antonio Iturbe

37. “Life is full of surprises, but sometimes, it can be truly extraordinary.”

— Antonio Iturbe

38. “Truth is to put together by destiny; it’s nothing more than a whim of fate. A lie, on the other hand, is more human; it’s created by mankind and tailor-made to purpose.”

— Antonio Iturbe

39. “If they lock you up in a lunatic asylum, the worst thing that can happen to you is that you’re sane.”

— Antonio Iturbe

40. “The bricks used to construct this story are facts, and they are held together in these pages with a mortar of fiction.”

— Antonio Iturbe

41. “El futur no es pot calcular.”

— Antonio Iturbe

42. “A child? Far from it. You have to have a childhood to be a child!”

— Antonio Iturbe

43. “Nemamo sutra, sve mora da bude sada!”

— Antonio Iturbe

44. “Hrabri su oni koji su u stanju da nadvladaju sopstveni strah.”

— Antonio Iturbe

45. “If human beings aren’t deeply moved by beauty, if they don’t close their eyes and activate their imaginations, if they aren’t capable of asking themselves questions and discerning the limits of their ignorance, then they are men or women, but they are not complete persons: Nothing significant distinguishes them from a salmon or a zebra or a musk ox.”

— Antonio Iturbe

46. “Our hatred is a victory for them.”

— Antonio Iturbe

47. “Life is chaotic, savage, and literature should be a reflection of that.”

— Antonio Iturbe

48. “No, Edita, no,” he says to her, very gently. “Our hatred is a victory for them.”

— Antonio Iturbe

49. “And when one of them looks away to remember a difficult or painful moment from those years, the other one also turns their eyes toward that same point to which we only allow people we trust completely to accompany us, those who have seen us both laugh and cry. Together, they visit those moments that have marked them forever. They’re so young that telling each other about those years amounts to telling each other about their whole lives.”

— Antonio Iturbe

50. “On the Auschwitz platform, the Germans shoved them into a freight train and sent them with a group of women to Germany. It was a voyage of hunger, of thirst, of mothers separated from their children, of daughters without mothers. When they opened the stock car in Hamburg, the SS found a container full of broken dolls.”

— Antonio Iturbe