top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by German Authors
"The real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development."
"Marrying means to halve one's rights and double one's duties."
"Hence it happens that one takes words for concepts, and concepts for the things themselves."
"Stupidity is relatively harmless, but intelligent stupidity is highly dangerous"
"Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking."
"We have to cease to think, if we refuse to do it in the prison house of language; for we cannot reach further than the doubt which asks whether the limit we see is really a limit."
"In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality."
"Stay away from negative people. They have a problem for every solution."
"The SS, as such, behaved no more criminally than any other social groups would behave when taking part in political events."
"Our faith in others betrays that we would rather have faith in ourselves. Our longing for a friend is our betrayer. And often with our love we want merely to overcome envy. And often we attack and make ourselves enemies, to conceal that we are vulnerable."
"The essence of optimism is that it takes no account of the present, but it is a source of inspiration, of vitality and hope where others have resigned; it enables a man to hold his head high, to claim the future for himself and not to abandon it to his enemy."
"Being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt."
"The human being is not the lord of beings, but the shepherd of Being."
"Grant that the true organ with which the beautiful is apprehended is the imagination, and it follows that all arts are likely to affect the feelings indirectly."
"People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights."
"The state has physical power and uses it when necessary; the power of religion is love and beneficence."
"If you have to make mistakes, make them good and big, don't be middling if you can help it."
"Government must be a transparent garment which tightly clings to the people's body."
"Mark this well, you proud men of action! you are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought."
"Every church is a stone on the grave of a god-man: it does not want him to rise up again under any circumstances."
"Prejudice of any kind implies that you are identified with the thinking mind. It means you don't see the other human being anymore, but only your own concept of that human being. To reduce the aliveness of another human being to a concept is already a form of violence."
"The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it."
"It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion."
"Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man."
"Giving style to one's character - a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own natures and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye."
"The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it."
"What's breaking into a bank compared with founding a bank?"
"Politics are not the task of a Christian."
"If the highest things are unknowable, then the highest capacity or virtue of man cannot be theoretical wisdom."
"Universal education is the most corroding and disintegrating poison that liberalism has ever invented for its own destruction."
"I am a wanderer and mountain-climber, said he to his heart, I love not the plains, and it seemeth I cannot long sit still.And whatever may still overtake me as fate and experience-a wandering will be therein, and a mountain-climbing: in the end one experienceth only oneself."
"Let us show our fellow countrymen and the entire world what the Germans can do when they work for peace."
"Who knows what would have become of me, if my parents had not had their influence on me."
"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."
bottom of page