"My friends assured me that Hitler’s talk was sheer bombast,” Vishniac said in 1955. “But I replied that he would not hesitate to exterminate those people when he got around to it. And who was there to defend them? I knew I could be of little help, but I decided that, as a Jew, it was my duty to my ancestors, who grew up among the very people who were being threatened, to preserve — in pictures, at least — a world that might soon cease to exist."

“Concentration camp money... It was a German sadism that invented it. Can you do anything with it? Yes, you can cry.”

“...can you call a farm with a dozen geese a farm? Still, it was a little better for the Jews in Czechoslovakia. There were only two pogroms there. What's two pogroms?”

““No one who hasn’t tried it can comprehend the careful planning, the diabolical perseverance and the incredible skill it takes to obtain the results he gets,” the magazine quoted Philippe Halsman, former president of the American Society of Magazine Photographers, as saying of Vishniac. “The man is a special kind of genius.”

“You can't teach biology with a bottle containing dead animals and organisms.”

“Nature, God, or whatever you want to call the creator of the universe comes through the microscope clearly and strongly”

“Vishniac came back from his trips... with a collection of photographs that has become an important historical document, for it gives us a last minute look at the human beings he photographed just before the fury of the Nazi brutality exterminated them. Vishniac took with him on this self-imposed assignment... a rare depth of understanding and a native son's warmth and love for his people. ~ Edward Steichen, ex-director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, in the 1950s.”