No human race is superior no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.

The statement rejects hierarchies of race and religion and, more broadly, condemns the habit of judging people as undifferentiated groups. By insisting that “collective judgments are wrong,” it argues that moral and intellectual evaluation must be directed toward individuals and their actions rather than toward inherited identities. The final sentence sharpens the point: racism is not merely a set of hostile feelings but a mode of thinking that generalizes, ranks, and essentializes entire populations. In Wiesel’s moral universe—shaped by the catastrophic consequences of racial ideology—such generalizations are portrayed as both intellectually lazy and ethically dangerous, because they prepare the ground for exclusion, persecution, and violence.