Timur Vermes Quotes

And oh, how a warrior drunk on victory can enchant a young woman.

What kinds of truths were being hidden? Were there lying turnips? Were there lying leeks?

The telephone, it struck me at that moment, is the wrong means of communication for people without ears.

In your heart of hearts, I believe all of you around this table know what this country needs.

To begin with I thought we were driving around in circles until I realised that Herr Starbuck owned dozens of coffee houses.

In my opinion, only bakers need to work early in the morning. And the Gestapo, of course - that is self-evident. To tear the Bolshevist rabble from their beds, so long as they are not Bolshevist bakers. For they would already be awake, and thus the Gestapo, for their part, would have to get up even earlier, and so on and so forth.

Someone with whom I was unacquainted had turned to me with a military problem, and as I was currently without a state to govern I decided to lend my comrade my support. Thus I spent the following three and a half hours engaged in a naval exercise by the name of "Minesweeper.

One must undertake everything with utter, fanatical determination. Or one will get nowhere.

But with superior morale, with an unwavering, fanatical spirit, everything is possible!

You can forget Stalin," he said, pledging his allegiance. "We're not the History Channel.

There are always advantages to having reached a certain time in one's life. I am most pleased that I did not come to politics until I was thirty, an age when a man finds his peace physically and sexually, and thus can focus all his energies on his actual goals, without his time and steel forever being purloined by the impulses of physical love.

Such people never focus on their own goal, they always elect to pursue the goal which promises the most rapid success, and yet fail to recognise that this success will never be their own.

In Berlin I have time and again met people who make no secret of the fact that their only reason for stirring at such an ungodly hour of the morning is so that they can leave the office earlier in the afternoon. I have suggested to several of these eight-hour logicians that they ought to start work at ten o'clock at night, thereby allowing them to leave at six in the morning and perhaps even arrive home before it is time to get up.

One must choose the apposite moment to crush one's political opponent. Not when he has nothing to say. But when he is attempting to say something.

Wherever there is a large motorway enabling the transport of ton after ton of German goods, you will inevitably find a sweet little rabbit trembling by the roadside.

I had preached again and again that one must never finish off the east for good, that a certain element of conflict must always remain, that a healthy Volk needs a war every twenty five years for the renewal of its blood.

In the ideal state a leader ensures that each man is effective in just the right capacity.

As I walked past I saw the extraordinary wreckage of beer-corpses. Somehow, despite all their economic mismanagement, these parties must have brought about an unexpected level of prosperity. Well, not having to wage war certainly saves the odd cost. Looking at the state of the Volk here, however, even the most deluded individual would have to admit than in 1942 or 1944, yes, even in the most harrowing nights of bombardment, the Germans were in better shape than on this September evening at the beginning of the third millennium.

Silence is often underestimated

As always when people are overtaxed creatively, they come up with the most dubious suggestions.

And stop smoking," I yelled after him. "You smell like cheap ham!

A large number of people had already gathered in the city centre to demonstrate against the government. Seemingly it had occurred to no-one to opt for the most obvious solution – stormtroopers.

The Reichsmark was no longer legal tender, even though others - probably some clueless dilettantes on the side of the victorious powers - had clearly adapted my plan to turn it into a European-wide currency. At any rate, transactions were now being carried out in an artificial currency called "euro," regarded, as one would expect, with a high level of mistrust. I could have told those responsible that this would be the case.

Had I known back then just how cheap it was to employ Poles, I might as well have leapfrogged their country.

He looked confused. "With your girlfriend, I mean. Who was to blame?"
"I don't know," I said. "Ultimately Churchill, I expect.