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"Since the German people, with unparalleled heroism, but also at the cost of fearful sacrifices, has waged war against half the world, it is our right and our duty to obtain safety and independence for ourselves at sea."
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"What branch do you want to go in? "I don' give a god-damn, said Pilon jauntily. "I guess we need men like you in the infantry. And Pilon was written so. He turned then to Big Joe, and the Portagee was getting sober. "Where do you want to go? "I want to go home, Big Joe said miserably. The sergeant put him in the infantry too."

"They meet, as we shall meet tomorrow, to murder one another; they kill and maim tens of thousands, and then have thanksgiving services for having killed so many people (they even exaggerate the number), and they announce a victory, supposing that the more people they have killed the greater their achievement. How does God above look at them and hear them?" exclaimed Prince Andrew in a shrill, piercing voice. "Ah, my friend, it has of late become hard for me to live. I see that I have begun to understand too much. And it doesn't do for man to taste of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.... Ah, well, it's not for long!" he added."

"How very like humans to pervert a message of love and peace to make it into an ideology of war and oppression to serve their own ends."

"That's my town,' Joaquin said. 'What a fine town, but how the buena gente, the good people of that town, have suffered in this war.' Then, his face grave, 'There they shot my father. My mother. My brother-in-law and now my sister.' 'What barbarians,' Robert Jordan said. How many times had he heard this? How many times had he watched people say it with difficulty? How many times had he seen their eyes fill and their throats harden with the difficulty of saying my father, or my brother, or my mother, or my sister? He could not remember how many times he heard them mention their dead in this way. Nearly always they spoke as this boy did now; suddenly and apropos of the mention of the town and always you said, 'What barbarians."

"In the Second World War he took no public part, having escaped to a neutral country just before its outbreak. In private conversation he was wont to say that homicidal lunatics were well employed in killing each other, but that sensible men would keep out of their way while they were doing it. Fortunately this outlook, which is reminiscent of Bentham, has become rare in this age, which recognizes that heroism has a value independent of its utility. The Last Survivor of a Dead Epoch."

"Om rubed his head. This wasn't god-like thinking. It seemed simpler when you were up here. It was all a game. You forgot that it wasn't a game down there. People died. Bits got chopped off. We're like eagles up here, he thought. Sometimes we show tortoise how to fly. Then we let go."
Explore more quotes by Bernhard von Bulow

"This fact lays on us - so long as the maintenance of good relations with Russia seems to us worth an effort - the duty of satisfying Russia that she has no need to fear any invasion of her sphere of interests on Germany's part."

"English policy may not yet have made the definite decision to attack us; but it doubtless wishes, by all and every means, even the most extreme, to hinder every further expansion of German international influence and of German maritime power."

"We must also win really sufficient and, above all, practical, guarantees for the freedom of the seas and for the further fulfilment of our economic and political tasks throughout the world."

"The history of England, who has always dealt most harshly with her vanquished foe in the few European wars in which she has taken part in modern times, gives us Germans an idea of the fate in store for us if defeated."

"For the sake of our interests, as well as of our honour and dignity, we were obliged to see that we won for our international policy the same independence that we had secured for our European policy."

"But it is a law of life and development in history where two national civilizations meet they fight for ascendancy."

"It was both necessary and desirable for us to be so strong at sea that no Sea Power could attack us without risk, so that we might be free to protect our oversea interests, independently of the influence and the choice of other Sea Powers."

"Since the German people, with unparalleled heroism, but also at the cost of fearful sacrifices, has waged war against half the world, it is our right and our duty to obtain safety and independence for ourselves at sea."
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