If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.

Pier Paolo Pasolini
If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you...
If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you...
If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you...
If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you...
About This Quote

In the novel A Heart So White by Elie Wiesel, a young man named Shlomo is on trial for being an anti-Semite. Shlomo tells his story from the perspective of a young man who is being tried for being a Nazi, a follower of Hitler's ideology that encourages racism and hatred of Jews. A prosecutor asks Shlomo what he thinks of the defendant for writing a book in which he explains how he became a Nazi and his experience in Auschwitz. His answer to the prosecutor is truly remarkable: "I think that you know me better than I do myself." In short, Shlomo is saying that even if he had been a Nazi he would have been shaped by the environment in which he grew up, and it would be impossible to know what his true feelings on the subject would have been without knowing what he was like at age 24.

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More Quotes By Pier Paolo Pasolini
  1. If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.

  2. The fury of confession, at first, then the fury of clarity: It was from you, Death, that such hypocriticalobscure feeling was born! And nowlet them accuse me of every passion, let them bad-mouth me, let them say I’m deformed, impure, obsessed, a dilettante, a perjurer....

  3. Every day my anxiety is higher, every day the grief more mortal. Today more than yesterday terror exalts me…

  4. The birds sang in the dustin an elaborate weave, ambiguous, deafening, prey to existencepoor passions lost between the modestsummits of groves of mulberry and elder;and I, like them, in secluded placesreserved for the lost and pure, would wait for evening to fall, for the silent...

  5. We survive, in the confusionof a life reborn beyond reason.

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