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Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little.

— Irena Sendler

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More quotes by Irena Sendler

I was brought up to believe that a person must be rescued when drowning, regardless of religion and nationality.

Over a half-century has passed since the hell of the Holocaust, but its spectre still hangs over the world and doesn’t allow us to forget.

Letter to the Polish Senate (2007)

Heroes do extraordinary things. What I did was not an extraordinary thing. It was normal.

I am the only person still alive of that rescuing group but I want everyone to know that, while I was coordinating our efforts, we were about twenty to twenty five people. I did not do it alone.

I still carry the marks on my body of what those "German supermen" did to me then. I was sentenced to death.

All Irena Sendler quotes →

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Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves.

Étienne de La Boétie Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)

The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error.

George Bernard Shaw Man and Superman (1903)

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

C. S. Lewis God in the Dock (1970)

Affectation hides three times as many virtues as charity does sins.

Horace Mann Thoughts Selected from the Writings of Horace Mann (1867)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Irena Sendler (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.