Quotes by German Authors - Page 32

And if the characters haven't died, they carry on murdering to this very day ...
Rebekka Kricheldorf
When they finally did dare it, at first with stolen glances and then candid ones, they had to smile. They were uncommonly proud. For the first time they had done something out of Love.
Patrick Süskind
One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.
Albert Einstein
It's never ok to hit a girl. Never. Not even if she cheats on you. A girl is not your property. She's a human being. She is just as important as you. She is your equal. And her wishes and feelings are just as valid as yours. All you can do is treat her nice, and hope she wants to be with you. If she chooses to be with you, great! If not, or if she chooses to leave you at some point, you have to let her go. You have no right to stop her. You don't own her, and you don't have the right to tell her what to do. She's your partner. Not your servant, not your sex slave, and not your punching bag.
Oliver Markus
The introduction of free competition is thus public declaration that from now on the members of society are unequal only to the extent that their capitals are unequal, that capital is the decisive power, and that therefore the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, have become the first class in society.
Karl Marx
Our way would seem quite familiar to the Romans, more by far than the Greek way. Socrates in the Symposium, when Alcibiades challenged him to drink two quarts of wine, could have done so or not as he chose, but the diners-out of Horace's day had no such freedom. He speaks often of the master of the drinking, who was always appointed to dictate how much each man was to drink. Very many unseemly dinner parties must have paved the way for that regulation. A Roman in his cups would've been hard to handle, surly, quarrelsome, dangerous. No doubt there had been banquets without number which had ended in fights, broken furniture, injuries, deaths. Pass a law then, the invariable Roman remedy, to keep drunkenness within bounds. Of course it worked both ways: everybody was obliged to empty the same number of glasses and the temperate man had to drink a great deal more than he wanted, but whenever laws are brought in to regulate the majority who have not abused their liberty for the sake of the minority who have, just such results come to pass. Indeed, any attempt to establish a uniform average in that stubbornly individual phenomenon, human nature, will have only one result that can be foretold with certainty: it will press hardest on the best.
Edith Hamilton
Equality today means "sameness" rather than "oneness".
Erich Fromm
If any religion turns against love of equal partners, there's something flawed with the religion, not the love.
Akilnathan Logeswaran
To a mankind that recognizes the equality of man everywhere, every war becomes a civil war.
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
The craving for equality can express itself either as a desire to pull everyone down to our own level (by belittling them, excluding them, tripping them up) or as a desire to raise ourselves up along with everyone else (by acknowledging them, helping them, and rejoicing in their success).
Friedrich Nietzsche
Break the character and independence of your man and you will have an obedient trooper.
Jan Valtin
I can't bear the thought of living an entire lifetime on this planet and not getting to do all the things I dream of doing, simply because they aren't allowed. I don't think it will ever be enough, this version of freedom, until it is all-inclusive. I don't think I can be happy unless I'm truly independent.
Deborah Feldman
It is invisible hands that torment and bend us the worst
Friedrich Nietzsche
And history teaches this iron law of revolutions: the more extensive the eradication of existing authority, the more its successors must rely on naked power to establish themselves. For,in the end,legitimacy involves an acceptance of authority without compulsion; its absence turns every contest into a test of strength.
Henry Kissinger
man cannot control the current of events. he can only float with them and steer
Otto von Bismarck
I would not have shied away from an assignment to sail a canoe around Cape Horn or to take charge of the government of Afghanistan.
Jan Valtin
We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings.
Albert Einstein
no concept of danger, reality, flow or compassion. you can feel the despair escaping from their machines, their lives as hopeless and as numbed as yours.
Charles Bukowski
my beerdrunk soul is sadder than all the dead christmas trees of the world.
Charles Bukowski
Wherever one encounters members of the human race, they always show the traits of a being that is condemned to surrealistic effort. Whoever goes in search of humans will find acrobats.
Peter Sloterdijk
Maple thought optimistically that human beings, on their good days, weren't much dimmer than sheep. Or at least, not much dimmer than dim sheep.
Leonie Swann
Never judge people based on their nationality, religion, race, gender, skin colour or look. Humans are all the same. They’re God’s loving children." Angel of Hope
Lily Amis
Heaven is high and earth wide.If you ride three feet above ground than other men,you will know what that means.
Rudolf C. Binding
Animals are inspirational. They don’t know how to lie. They are natural forces.
Charles Bukowski
Men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension.
W.G. Sebald
Dogs are angels full of poop.
Oliver Gaspirtz
Animal welfare - yes. Animal rights - don't make me laugh. I'm not an animals rights activist. I certainly do not love animals. In fact, I secretly mistrust all four-legged / furry / two-winged / feathered / shelled ar scaly brothers and sisters. If I were them, I would by now be plotting ultimate revenge on a scale previously unknown to man. ... I stick to a vegan diet only for reasons of self-preservertion. Call it insurance. When the time of the great animal uprising comes, I may have a small chance of escaping ...
Sharon Dodua Otoo
Animals are good human beings and human beings are bad animals
Akif Pirinçci
Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.
Theodor W. Adorno
The dog is the most faithful of animals and would be much esteemed were it not so common. Our Lord God has made His greatest gifts the commonest.
Martin Luther
Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The goal had been important only for the sake of finding the path to it.
Sten Nadolny
Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
Hannah Arendt
...it happens that "society is saved" as often as the circle of its ruling class is narrowed, as often as a more exclusive interest asserts itself over the general. Every demand for the most simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most commonplace republicanism, for the flattest democracy is forthwith punished as an "assault upon society" and is branded as "Socialism.
Karl Marx
In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time. Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims.They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
Friedrich Engels
Hauriou, became a crown witness for us when he confirmed this connection in 1916, in the midst of WWI: “The revolution of 1789 had no other goal than absolute access to the writing of legal statutes and the systematic destruction of customary institutions. It resulted in a state of permanent revolution because the mobility of the writing of laws did not provide for the stability of certain customary institutions, because the forces of change were stronger than the forces of stability. Social and political life in France was completely emptied of institutions and was only able to provisionally maintain itself by sudden jolts spurred by the heightened morality.
Carl Schmitt
The essence and value of the law lies in its stability and durability (...), in its “relative eternity.” Only then does the legislator’s self-limitation and the independence of the law-bound judge find an anchor. The experiences of the French Revolution showed how an unleashed pouvoir législatif could generate a legislative orgy.
Carl Schmitt
A revolutionary career does not lead to banquets and honorary titles, interesting research and professorial wages. It leads to misery, disgrace, ingratitude, prison and a voyage into the unknown, illuminated by only an almost superhuman belief.
Max Horkheimer
Revolutions arise from obstinacy. People are dissatisfied with what they are told and they develop new ideas.
Dirk Kurbjuweit
The more we gained knowledge of these new totalitarian systems of mass-rule, the more we realized not only their similarity of structure, but also the fact that we had to do with a type of dominance that had been known in earlier epochs. We discovered that what the ancients called “tyrannis,” or 'cheirokratia,” what Sulla or the tyrants of the Italian Rennaissance had practised, and what finally alarmed the world in the French Revolution and under Napoleon, had surprisingly many similarities with modern totalitarianism, although this latter had elements with which they cannot be compared, and although it possessed means of domination unknown in past ages.
Wilhelm Röpke
The development of the proletarian elite does not take place in an academic setting. Rather, it is brought about by battles in the factories and unions, by disciplinary punishments and some very dirty fights within the parties and outside of them, by jail sentences and illegality. Students do not flock in large numbers there as they do to the lecture halls and laboratories of the bourgeoisie. The career of a revolutionary does not consists of banquets and honarary titles, of interesting research projects and professional salaries; more likely, it will acquaint them with misery, dishonory and jail and, at the end, uncertainty. These conditions are made bearable only by a super-human faith. Understandably, this way of life will not be the choice of those who are nothing more than clever.
Max Horkheimer
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.
Karl Marx
Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?
Friedrich Engels
The revolution is for the sake of life, not death.
Herbert Marcuse
The Constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue and the red republicans, the heroes of Africa, the thunder from the platform, the sheet lightning of the daily press, the entire literature, the political names and the intellectual reputations, the civil law and penal code, the liberté, égalité, fraternité and the second of May 1852—all have vanished like a phantasmagoria before the spell of a man whom even his enemies do not make out to be a magician. Universal suffrage seems to have survived only for a moment, in order that with its own hand it may make its last will and testament before the eyes of all the world and declare in the name of the people itself: Everything that exists has this much worth, that it will perish.
Karl Marx
Grease the guillotine with the fat of tyrants. Pull the concubine out of the clergyman`s bed. Monarch`s blood must flow, as thick as our boots. From there the free republic will rise.
Friedrich Hecker
When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms, and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.In place of the old bourgeois society with its classes and class antagonisms we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
Karl Marx
So if you have to live amongst men, you must allow everyone the right to exist in accordance with the character he has, whatever it turns out to be: and all you should strive to do is to make use of this character in such a way as its kind and nature permit, rather than to hope for any alteration in it, or to condemn it off-hand for what it is. This is the true sense of the maxim--Live and let live. That, however, is a task which is difficult in proportion as it is right; and he is a happy man who can once for all avoid having to do with a great many of his fellow creatures.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Order and simplification are the first steps towards mastery of a subject
Thomas Mann
Whatever liberates our spirit without giving us mastery over ourselves is destructive.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
to have to combat one’s instincts—that is the formula for decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness and instinct are one.
Friedrich Nietzsche
What determines our brotherhood is what that man is by reason of Christ. Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us. This is true not merely at the beginning, as though in the course of time something else were to be added to our community; it remains so for all the future and to all eternity. I have community with others and I shall continue to have it only through Jesus Christ. The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one and only thing that is vital between us. We have one another only through Christ, but through Christ we do have one another, wholly, for eternity.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Love is not only pure joy, and delight, but also great and deep heaviness of heart and sorrow. But love too is full of joy and sweetness even in bitter sorrow, because it regards the misery and injury of others as its own. So also Christ was glowing with burning love in His last and greatest agony. According to St. Hilary, it was Christ's greatest joy that He endured the greatest woe. Thus God "giveth strength and power unto His people" (Ps. 68:15). While they experience the greatest sorrow, their hearts overflow with joy.
Martin Luther
Christ has come into the world to lay out a garden wherein, amid splendor and abundance, there should thrive the violet of humanity, the myrtle of mortification, the rose of love, the lily of virginal souls, the laurel of confessors and the palm of martyrs.
Fr James Groenings
[Christ] is the Mediator, not only between God and man, but between man and man, between man and reality.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
In the cross of Christ God is taking man dead-seriously so that he may open up for him the happy freedom of Easter. God takes upon himself the pain of negation and the God forsakenness of judgement to reconcile himself with his enemies and to give the godless fellowship with himself.~ Theology of Play, p.33
Jürgen Moltmann
The temptation of Christ was harder, unspeakably harder, than the temptation of Adam; for Adam carried nothing in himself which could have given the tempter a claim and power over him. But Christ bore in himself the whole burden of the flesh, under the curse, under condemnation; and yet his temptation was henceforth to bring help and salvation to all flesh.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
We use to think that we’ll go to Heaven if we avoid sins or have our pastor remove them. To labor ourselves into paradise is a new and somewhat discouraging perspective.
Stefan Emunds
So many people come to church with a genuine desire to hear what we have to say, yet they are always going back home with the uncomfortable feeling that we are making it too difficult for them to come to Jesus.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
If there is no element of asceticism in our lives, if we give free rein to the desires of the flesh (taking care of course to keep within the limits of what seems permissible to the world), we shall find it hard to train for the service of Christ. When the flesh is satisfied it is hard to pray with cheerfulness or to devote oneself to a life of service which calls for much self-renunciation.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer