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Quotes by German Authors
"I wanted to become a cartoon artist, a portrait artist, and an illustrator. This was my first idea."
"We can only win by giving everything and being ready to defeat the adversary with fiery aggression."
"A good man with a good conscience doesn't walk so fast."
"Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes."
"In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it."
"Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world."
"Art cannot result from sophisticated, frivolous, or superficial effects."
"When you get into your car, shut the door and be there for just half a minute. Breathe, feel the energy inside your body, look around at the sky, the trees. The mind might tell you, 'I don't have time.' But that's the mind talking to you. Even the busiest person has time for 30 seconds of space."
"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."
"Women's propaganda must touch upon all those questions which are of great importance to the general proletarian movement. The main task is, indeed, to awaken the women's class consciousness and to incorporate them into the class struggle."
"But as a German - and I am German-born - we Germans are condemned once again to be radical revisionists."
"Politics are not the task of a Christian."
"Our vanity is hardest to wound precisely when our pride has just been wounded."
"It is usually more important how a man meets his fate than what it is."
"If you cannot mould yourself entirely as you would wish, how can you expect other people to be entirely to your liking?"
"Yes, I was invited to make the sound environment at a booth of a huge electronic company, during the Hanover Industrial Fair in 1973. It was a job. Slightly good paid. But not as much as my producer then told the press."
"These clashes are the only evolu-tionary possibility which will enable us one day, now that Fate has given us the Fuehrer Adolf Hitler, to create the Germanic Reich."
"Let us show our fellow countrymen and the entire world what the Germans can do when they work for peace."
"To try to fashion something from suffering, to relish our triumphs, and to endure defeats without resentment: all that is compatible with the faith of a heretic."
"The doctrine of original sin claims that all men sinned in Adam; but whether they did or whether it is merely a fact that all men sin does not basically affect the problem of suffering."
"Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy."
"Man's nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered."
"Full surely there is a blessedness beyond the grave for those who have already entered on it here, and in no other form than that wherein they know it here, at any moment."
"That is why everyone in politics, and we do it, must make sure that they do not depend on one single interest group. A good compromise is one where everybody makes a contribution."
"Religion is the idol of the mob; it adores everything it does not understand."
"If on the one side we do not harbor the illusion that the entire proletariat must be enlightened before it can be called into battle, so on the other we do not doubt that as much enlightenment as possible must be produced with oral and printed agitation."
"From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization."
"The success of each of us benefits us all, and the success of us all benefits each of us individually."
"Philosophy can only be approached with the most concrete comprehension."
"In the first quarter of the nineteenth century the experimental proof for the interdependence of the composition and properties of chemical compounds resulted in the theory that they are mutually related, so that like composition governs like properties, and conversely."
"Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness."
"Don't speak evil of someone if you don't know for certain, and if you do know ask yourself, why am I telling it?"
"He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her."
"The knife of historical relativism... which has cut to pieces all metaphysics and religion must also bring about healing."
"You could say that we are living in an internally globalized country."
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