Quotes by German Authors - Page 34

By buying the power of the workman, the capitalist has, therefore, acquired the right to use of make that labouring power during the whole day or week.
Karl Marx
Take the example of our spinner. We have seen that, to daily reproduce his labouring power, he must daily reproduce a value of three shillings, which he will do by working six hours daily. But this does not disable him from working ten or twelve or more hours a day. But by paying the daily or weekly value of the spinner's labouring power the capitalist has acquired the right of using that labouring power during the whole day or week. He will, therefore, make him work say, daily, twelve hours. Over and above the six hours required to replace his wages, or the value of his labouring power, he will, therefore, have to work six other hours, which I shall call hours of surplus labour, which surplus labour will realize itself in a surplus value and a surplus produce. If our spinner, for example, by his daily labour of six hours, added three shillings' value to the cotton, a value forming an exact equivalent to his wages, he will, in twelce hours, add six shillings' worth to the cotton, and produce a proportional surplus of yarn. As he has sold his labouring power to the capitalist, the whole value of produce created by him belongs to the capitalist, the owner pro tem. of his labouring power. By advancing three shillings, the capitalist will, therefore, realize a value of six shillings, because, advancing a value in which six hours of labour are crystallized. By repeating this same process daily, the capitalist will daily advance three shillings and daily pocket six shillings, one half of which will go to pay wages anew, and the other half of which will form surplus value, for which the capitalist pays no equivalent. It is this sort of exchange between capital and labour upon which capitalistic production, or the wages system, is founded, and which must constantly result in reproducing the working man as a working man, and the capitalist as a capitalist.
Karl Marx
Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.
Albert Einstein
Production is carried on for profit, not for use. There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an “army of unemployed” almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid workers do not provide a profitable market, the production of consumers’ goods is restricted, and great hardship is the consequence. Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before.
Albert Einstein
But capital not only lives upon labour. Like a master, at once distinguished and barbarous, it drags with it into its grave the corpses of its slaves, whole hecatombs of workers, who perish in the crises.
Karl Marx
There is a patent conflict between the need to reverse or at least to control the impact of our economy on the biosphere and the imperatives of a capitalist market: maximum continuing growth in the search for profit.
Eric Hobsbawm
Capitalism puts things (capital) higher than life (labor). Power follows from possession, not from activity.
Erich Fromm
Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limitations to its economic expansion. The bourgeoisie turned to politics out of economic necessity; for if it did not want to give up the capitalist system whose inherent law is constant economic growth, it had to impose this law upon its home governments and to proclaim expansion to be an ultimate political goal of foreign policy.
Hannah Arendt
It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, it has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- free trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
Karl Marx
After the collapse of socialism, capitalism remained without a rival. This unusual situation unleashed its greedy and - above all - its suicidal power. The belief is now that everything - and everyone - is fair game.
Günter Grass
I wanna be forever young.
Alphaville
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors,' and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous 'cash payment.' It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
Karl Marx
How are his poems?""He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way.
Charles Bukowski
The Artist," an ancient sage had once said, "is always sitting on the doorsteps of the rich.
Charles Bukowski
my poems are only bits of scratchingon the floor of acage.
Charles Bukowski
nothing's news.it's the same old thing indisguise.only one thing comes without adisguise and you only see itonce, ormaybe never.like getting hit by a freighttrain.makes us realize that all ourmoaning about long lost girlsin gingham dressesis not so importantafterall.
Charles Bukowski
There occurs the beautiful feeling that only humanity together is the true human being, and that the individual can be cheerful and happy only if he has the courage to feel himself in the Whole.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Ignore the misery. Custom invites you to ignore the misery."SHOW YOUR TONGUE
Günter Grass
A day came when I should have died, and after that nothing seemed very important. So I have stayed as I am, without regret, separated from the normal human condition.
Guy Sajer
What you achieve, endures throughout time
Rafik Schami
Don't become a grumpy old dater! Life ids for living, laughing and loving!Stop searching, start finding!
Siggy Buckley
It's like playing the lottery. It doesn't matter how extremely low the chances are of winning. You gotta be in it to win it. Hitting on every girl in sight is like buying a whole lot of lottery tickets. You never know, one day one of them might actually pay off.
Oliver Markus
Ready when you are.
Kerstin Gier
The birth and growth of modern antisemitism has been accompanied by and interconnected with Jewish assimilation, the secularization and withering away of the old religious and spiritual values of Judaism. What actually happened was that great parts of the Jewish people were at the same time threatened by physical extinction from without and dissolution from within. In this situation, Jews concerned with the survival of their people would, in a curious and desperate misinterpretation, hit on the consoling idea that antisemitism, after all, might be an excellent means for keeping the people together so that the assumption of external antisemitism would even imply an external guarantee of Jewish existence. This superstition, a secularized travesty of the idea of eternity inherent in a faith in chosenness and a Messianic hope, has been strengthened through the fact that for many centuries the Jews experienced the Christian brand of hostility which was indeed a powerful agent of preservation, spiritually as well as politically. The Jews mistook modern anti-Christian antisemitism for the old religious Jew-hatred—and this all the more innocently because their assimilation had by-passed Christianity in its religious and cultural aspect. Confronted with an obvious symptom of the decline of Christianity, they could therefore imagine in all ignorance that this was some revival of the so-called "Dark Ages." Ignorance or misunderstanding of their own past were partly responsible for their fatal underestimation of the actual and unprecedented dangers which lay ahead. But one should also bear in mind that lack of political ability and judgment have been caused by the very nature of Jewish history, the history of a people without a government, without a country, and without a language. Jewish history offers the extraordinary spectacle of a people, unique in this respect, which began its history with a well-defined concept of history and an almost conscious resolution to achieve a well-circumscribed plan on earth and then, without giving up this concept, avoided all political action for two thousand years. The result was that the political history of the Jewish people became even more dependent upon unforeseen, accidental factors than the history of other nations, so that the Jews stumbled from one role to the other and accepted responsibility for none.
Hannah Arendt
If thou art willing to suffer no adversity, how wilt thou be the friend of Christ?
Thomas à Kempis
To conclude this personal note, I, William Joyce, will merely say that I left England because I would not fight for Jewry against the Führer and National Socialism, and because I believe most ardently, as I do today, that victory and a perpetuation of the old system would be an incomparably greater evil for [England] than defeat coupled with a possibility of building something new, something really national, something truly socialist.
Lord Haw Haw (William Joyce)
He who is a firstling is ever sacrificed.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Bravery is good when the cause is good.
Bernhard Schlink
Those who serve and those who ruleLepers, kings and mindless foolsEmpire leaders, tyrant's toolsAll will fade with timeHail the cowards, brave at heartThe ugly and the beautifulThose who never felt their soulsAll live transient lives
Kreator
Most so-called brave people lack imagination. As though they can’t conceive of what would happen if something went wrong. The truly brave overcome their imagination and do what they have to do. 2
Charles Bukowski
The higher man is distinguished from the lower by his fearlessness and his readiness to challenge misfortune.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I did it, and it's all right. Even the worst experiences were right in their time, because otherwise, it wouldn't have come to this point. That was your road, and you had to walk it.
Michael "Bommi" Baumann
He had thrown himself away, he had lost interest in everything, and life, falling in with his feelings, had demanded nothing of him. He had lived as an outsider, an idler and onlooker, well liked in his young manhood, alone in his illness and advancing years. Seized with weariness, he sat down on the wall, and the river murmured darkly in his thoughts.
Hermann Hesse
Once upon a time there was a poor child with no father and no mother everything was deadand no one was left in the whole world.Everything was deadand it went and searched day and night And since nobody was left on the earth it wanted to go up to the heavens and the moon was looking at it so friendly and when it finally got to the moon the moon was a piece of rotten wood and then it went to the sun and when it got there the sun was a wilted sunflower and when it got to the stars they were little golden flies stuck up therelike the shrike sticks 'em on the blackthorn and when it wanted to go back down to earth the earth was an overturned piss pot! and was all alone.
Georg Büchner
I'd rather believe in reincarnation than hell. The idea of an afterlife is much so more tolerable when returning is an option.
Deborah Feldman
Could one that's damned stand in high Heaven, even thereHe'd feel within himself all Hell and Hell's despair.
Angelus Silesius
For whence did Dante get the material for his hell, if not from this actual world of ours? And indeed he made a downright hell of it.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The careless, the lukewarm Catholics should, above all, dread hell, for he is continually walking on the brink of the infernal abyss. He makes little of the precepts of hearing Mass, of the prescribed abstinence from flesh meat, he scruples not neglecting the religious training of his children, he associates with persons and frequents places that are to him an occasion of sin, he yields to impure thoughts, commits sins of impurity without remorse, gives way to his vindictive feelings against his neighbor, indulges in excess in eating and drinking, neglects prayer and the sacraments. Now is the time for him to be aroused from his life of sin, now is the time for him to give up sin and change his life, for if he defers doing so, it may soon be to late. This may, indeed, be the last warning that God gives him.
Fr. Martin von Cochem
The strongest intimidation, by the way, is the invention of a hereafter with a hell everlasting.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Just as God's love entered the world, thereby submitting to the misunderstanding and ambiguity that characterize everything worldly, so also Christian love does not exist anywhere but in the worldly, in an infinite variety of concrete worldly action, and subject to misunderstanding and condemnation. Every attempt to portray a Christianity of 'pure' love purged of worldly 'impurities' is a false purism and perfectionism that scorns God's becoming human and falls prey to the fate of all ideologies. God was not too pure to enter the world.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Theology without proclamation is empty, proclamation without theology is blind.
Gerhard Ebeling
It is most important for the practice of the Christian ministry, especially in its missionary activities toward those both within and without the Christian culture, to consider pagans, humanists, and Jews as members of the latent Spiritual Community and not as complete strangers who are invited into the Spiritual Community from outside. This insight serves as a powerful weapon against ecclesiastical and hierarchical arrogance.
Paul Tillich
If thinking wants to think God, then it must endeavor to tell stories.
Eberhard Jüngel
Gideon conquers, the church conquers, we conquer, because faith conquers. But the victory belongs not to Gideon, the church, or ourselves, but to God. And God's victory means our defeat, our humiliation; it means God's derision and wrath at all human pretensions of might, at humans puffing themselves up and thinking they are somebodies themselves. It means the world and its shouting is silenced, that all our ideas and plans are frustrated; it means the cross. The cross over the world -- that means that human beings, even the most noble, go down to dust whether it suits them or not, and with them all the gods and idols and lords of this world. The cross of Jesus Christ --that means God's bitter mockery of all human grandeur and God's bitter suffering in all human misery, God's lordship over all the world.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
After the evil spirit of a narrow Scholastic orthodoxy has been driven out, in the end seven much more wicked spirits return in its place.
Pope Benedict XVI
It is also possible to say precisely why. Truth seduces us very easily into a kind of joy of possession: I have comprehended this and that, learned it, understood it. Knowledge is power. I am therefore more than the other man who does not know this and that. I have greater possibilities and also greater temptations. Anyone who deals with truth - as we theologians certainly do - succumbs all too easily to the psychology of the possessor. But love is the opposite of the will to possess. It is self-giving. It boasteth not itself, but humbleth itself.
Helmut Thielicke
And so they easily suppose that this truce, owing to helplessness, is victory and that they have convinced the other man. But in fact, instead of winning him over, they have merely applied a kind of shock therapy — only it was never 'therapy.' They have smothered the first little flame of a man’s own spiritual life and a first shy question with the fire extinguisher of their erudition. By such performances a person can really be smothered and strangled!
Helmut Thielicke
It is a mistake for anyone who is just in this stage to appear before a church as a teacher. He has outgrown the naivete with which in young people’s work he might by all means have taken this part. He has not yet come to that maturity which would permit him to absorb into his own life and reproduce out of the freshness of his own personal faith the things which he imagines intellectually and which are accessible to him through reflection. We must have patience here and be able to wait. For the reasons I have mentioned I do not tolerate sermons by first-semester young theological students swaddled in their gowns. One ought to be able to keep still. During the period when the voice is changing we do not sing, and during this formative period in the life of the theological student he does not preach.
Helmut Thielicke
God's dialogue with us becomes truly human, since God conducts his part as man.
Pope Benedict XVI
The task of the theologian is to explain everything through God, and to explain God as unexplainable.
Karl Rahner
The formula "the Church is the Body of Christ" thus states that the Eucharist, in which the Lord gives us his body, forever remains the place where the Church is generated, where the Lord himself never ceases to found her anew; in the Eucharist the Church is most compactly herself - in all places, yet one only, just as he is one
Pope Benedict XVI
Besides Zeus on his throne, Justice has her seat.
Edith Hamilton
Creation exists to be a place for the covenant that God wants to make with man. The goal of creation is the covenant, the love story of God and man.
Pope Benedict XVI
If I have a theological virtue, it is curiosity or inquisitiveness.
Jürgen Moltmann
Thus there is need of deeper reflection. Before entering into an examination of individual texts, we must direct our attention to the whole picture, the question of structure. Only in this way can a meaningful arrangement of individual elements be obtained. Is there any place at all for something like Mariology in Holy Scripture, in the overall pattern of its faith and prayer? Methodologically, one can approach this question in one of two ways, backwards or forwards, so to speak: either one can read back from the New Testament into the Old or, conversely, feel one’s way slowly from the Old Testament into the New. Ideally both ways should coincide, permeating one another, in order to produce the most exact image possible. If one begins by reading backwards or, more precisely, from the end to the beginning, it becomes obvious that the image of Mary in the New Testament is woven entirely of Old Testament threads. In this reading, two or even three major strands of tradition can be clearly distinguished which were used to express the mystery of Mary. First, the portrait of Mary includes the likeness of the great mothers of the Old Testament: Sarah and especially Hannah, the mother of Samuel. Second, into that portrait is woven the whole theology of daughter Zion, in which, above all, the prophets announced the mystery of election and covenant, the mystery of God’s love for Israel. A third strand can perhaps be identified in the Gospel of John: the figure of Eve, the “woman” par excellence, is borrowed to interpret Mary.
Pope Benedict XVI
A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Well, first I would ask them if they had read the Bible; then I would ask them if they had understood it.
Jürgen Moltmann
Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church. We are fighting today for costly grace.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The mysterious, invisible authority of the divine child over human hearts is more solidly grounded then the visible and resplendent power of earthly rulers. Ultimately all authority on earth must serve only the authority of Jesus Christ over humankind.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The temple of God is the holy people in Jesus Christ. The Body of Christ is the living temple of God and of the new humanity.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer