Quotes by German Authors - Page 23

You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself.
Hermann Hesse
Nature can be so soothing to the tormented mind
Alexander von Humboldt
To an unbelieving person nothing renders service or work for good. He himself is in servitude to all things, and all things turned out for evil to him, because he uses all things in impious way for his own advantage, and not for the glory of God.
Martin Luther
What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.
Thomas Mann
Immature loves says ' I love because I need you. Mature love says I need you because I love you.
Erich Fromm
I need you.” He could not go any further down. Rock bottom. And at the very bottom was just this one thing. The core of it all. “Fucking... love you... too much.
Aleksandr Voinov
The antisemites who called themselves patriots introduced that new species of national feeling which consists primarily in a complete whitewash of one's own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others.
Hannah Arendt
In general, those who resort to mass murder on a collective scale always put forward the justification that they acted on behalf of the nation.
Taner Akçam
The anarch sticks to facts, not ideas. He suffers not for facts but because of them, and usually through his own fault, as in a traffic accident. Certainly, there are unforeseeable things – maltreatments. However, I believe I have attained a certain degree of self-distancing that allows me to regard this as an accident.
Ernst Jünger
Be proud of your people when you don't have to be ashamed of any of its social classes.
Adolf Hitler
The reason that the American Navy does so well in wartime is that war is chaos, and the Americans practice chaos on a daily basis.
Karl Dönitz
Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything!
W.G. Sebald
One must be cold if one wishes to savor chaos.
Ferdinand Hardekopf
It is not really a small thing when in small things we resist self.
Thomas à Kempis
Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Knowledge is power is time is money. Meaning that if I shared knowledge, it would tantamount to sharing power or money.
Robert Thier
A surprise visit? That's so romantic...but fairly risky." "If you don't take any risks, life will bass you by," Cunco shipped in.
Nina George
A Greek invention, democracy is highly overrated. For starters, it never worked in Greece. The first philosophers were fascists and, even today, 2,500 years later, the "cradle of Western civilization" remains an incompetent state. Roman emperors and a vengeful, authoritarian God are the true European success stories.
Thorsten J. Pattberg
Never bring a lot of money to where a poor man lives. He can only lose what little he has. On the other hand it is mathematically possible that he might win whatever you bring with you. What you must do, with money and the poor, is never let them get too close to one another.
Charles Bukowski
If my efforts have led to greater success than usual, this is due, I believe, to the fact that during my wanderings in the field of medicine, I have strayed onto paths where the gold was still lying by the wayside. It takes a little luck to be able to distinguish gold from dross, but that is all.
Robert Koch
I've learned to feel good when I feel good.it's better to be driven around in a red porschethan to ownone. the luck of the fool is inviolate.
Charles Bukowski
The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.
Adolf Hitler
There is no higher or purer pleasure than to sit with closed eyes and hear a naturally expressive voice recite... a play of Shakespeare's.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The sea always filled her with longing, though for what she was never sure.
Cornelia Funke
Communism, my dear," I said when I managed to get hold of a bunch of bananas for hers and let them ripen on the windowsill, given her just one each day so they'd last for a while
Alina Bronsky
If anybody tries to penetrate the past with the knife of the present will always act in vain. The past is invulnerable. Such attempts can only cause the present or the future to bleed." - Gregor Brand
Simon Schwartz
Crowned heads, wealth and privilege may well tremble should ever again the Black and Red unite!"-after the split between Anarchists and Marxists in 1872
Otto von Bismarck
Our athiests are pious people.
Max Stirner
Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world in various way; the point, however, is to change it
Karl Marx
If conquest constitutes a natural right on the part of the few, the many have only to gather sufficient strength in order to acquire the natural right of reconquering what has been taken from them
Karl Marx
With them the individual counted for nothing. No one was irreplaceable, because they drew no distinction between one man and another... In this community there was harmony, but no love.
Michael Ende
Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it
Karl Marx
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
Hannah Arendt
Schumpeter remarked how pleased he was with the Russian Revolution. Socialism was now no longer a discussion on paper, but had to prove its viability. Max Weber responded in great agitation: Communism, at this stage in Russian development, was virtually a crime, the road would lead over unparalleled human misery and end in a terrible catastrophe. "Quite likely", Schumpeter answered, "but what a fine laboratory". "A laboratory filled with mounds of corpses", Weber answered heatedly.
Karl Jaspers
Naked greed has been the moving spirit of civilization from the first day of its existence to the present time; wealth, more wealth, and wealth again; wealth not of society, but of this shabby individual was its sole and determining aim.
Friedrich Engels
It [the proletariat] should and must at once undertake socialist measures in the most energetic, unyielding and unhesitant fashion, in other words, exercise a dictatorship, but a dictatorship of the class, not of a party or of a clique – dictatorship of the class, that means in the broadest possible form on the basis of the most active, unlimited participation of the mass of the people, of unlimited democracy.
Rosa Luxemburg
A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient. Terror as we know it today strikes without any preliminary provocation, its victims are innocent even from the point of view of the persecutor. This was the case in Nazi Germany when full terror was directed against Jews, i.e., against people with certain common characteristics which were independent of their specific behavior. In Soviet Russia the situation is more confused, but the facts, unfortunately, are only too obvious. On the one hand, the Bolshevik system, unlike the Nazis, never admitted theoretically that it could practice terror against innocent people, and though in view of certain practices this may look like hypocrisy, it makes quite a difference. Russian practice, on the other hand, is even more "advanced" than the German in one respect: arbitrariness of terror is not even limited by racial differentiation, while the old class categories have long since been discarded, so that anybody in Russia may suddenly become a victim of the police terror. We are not concerned here with the ultimate consequence of rule by terror—namely, that nobody, not even the executors, can ever be free of fear; in our context we are dealing merely with the arbitrariness by which victims are chosen, and for this it is decisive that they are objectively innocent, that they are chosen regardless of what they may or may not have done.
Hannah Arendt
[T]he heart is a very unreliable coinpass, and even will and knowledge, as all ideological factors in general, are not to be trusted as guides if they are without any material basis…. [I]t is not love nor help which is the guiding rule of our time, but hammer or anvil. In reality it is thus: who does not want to be a servant must try to become a master. Under such conditions it is idle to hope that people will sacrifice realities for ideal precepts. We are not sentimental enough to expect such things. Though we use moral arguments in our struggle against the bourgeois, we do all we can to stimulate our class consciousness.
Joseph Dietzgen
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so: that is just what we intend.
Karl Marx
During the night two delegates of the railwaymen were arrested. The strikers immediately demanded their release, and as this was not conceded, they decided not to allow trains leave the town. At the station all the strikers with their wives and families sat down on the railway track-a sea of human beings. They were threatened with rifles salvoes. The workers bared their breast and cried, "Shoot!" A salvo was fired into the defenceless seated crowd, and 30 to 40 corpses, among them women and children, remained on the ground. On this becoming known the whole town of Kiev went to strike on the same day. The corpses of the murdered workers were raised on high by the crowd and carried round in mass demonstration.
Rosa Luxemburg
Around the hero, everything becomes a tragedy.Around God, everything becomes what? a world?
Friedrich Nietzsche
Whoever tells a lie is not pure of heart, and such a person can not cook a clean soup.
Ludwig van Beethoven
My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.
Helmut Newton
When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear.
Alfred Eisenstaedt
Nature is a picture waiting to be taken.
Katja Michael
Your most important gear is your eye, heart and soul.
Marius Vieth
No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Woe to the leader whose arguments at the end of a war are not as plausible as they were at the beginning.
Otto von Bismarck
Don't judge a man by his opinions, but what his opinions have made of him.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Some people never go crazy, what truly horrible lives they must live.
Charles Bukowski
A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?
Albert Einstein
Thinking over this thought, this whole thinking makes no sense.
Janosch
As much as we strive towards the light, we still want to be embraced by the shadow.
Zoran Drvenkar
It is the evening that questions thus from within me.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Such a lot is won when even a single man gets to his feet and says No
Bertolt Brecht
While the Zionists try to make the rest of the World believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn't even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organisation for their international world swindler, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks. It is a sign of their rising confidence and sense of security that at a time when one section is still playing the German, French-man, or Englishman, the other with open effrontery comes out as the Jewish race.
Adolf Hitler
It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it, even with the best right, but without being OBLIGED to do so, proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life in itself already brings with it; not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. Supposing such a one comes to grief, it is so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it, nor sympathize with it. And he cannot any longer go back! He cannot even go back again to the sympathy of men!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Life is like the ocean. You can either be the ball floating on the waves, or make your own waves.
Oliver Gaspirtz
They walked, and the long waves rolled and murmured rhythmically beside them; the fresh salty wind blew free and unobstructed in their faces, wrapped itself around their ears, and made them feel slightly numb and deliciously dizzy. They walked along in that wide, peaceful, whispering hush of the sea that gives every sound, near or far, some mysterious importance.
Thomas Mann
Be careful when you cast out your demons that you don’t throw away the best of yourself.
Friedrich Nietzsche