Berlin Blockade Quotes

The events in Prague, together with the Berlin blockade, convinced the European recipients of American economic assistance that they needed military protection as well: that led them to request the creation of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which committed the United States for the first time ever to the peacetime defense of Western Europe. ~ John Lewis

Rousseau's tormented and tortured nature made him look with eyes of hatred upon people like Diderot, d'Alembert, Helvétius in Paris, who seemed to him fastidious, sophisticated and artificial, incapable of understanding all those dark emotions, all those deep and torturing feelings which ravaged the heart of a true natural man torn from his native soil. ~ Isiah Berlin

It would be wrong to say that the city of Berlin is not regulated. What I think is more interesting is to what extent a city creates a sort of safe haven for its users, so that people feel confident that the city works on their behalf. ~ Olafur Eliasson

I hear it said that West Berlin is militarily untenable - and so was Bastogne, and so, in fact, was Stalingrad. Any danger spot is tenable if men - brave men - will make it so. ~ John F. Kennedy

My works are dear to me, each in its own way, I shall have to answer for them on the Day off Judgement. God alone knows whether I shall ever see them again. Quite apart from the money which I was going to receive for their sale there (exhibition in Gallery Der Sturm, Berlin June-July, 1914) and it is no small sum.. ~ Marc Chagall

The view that the truth is one and undivided, and the same for all men everywhere at all times, whether one finds it in the pronouncements of sacred books, traditional wisdom, the authority of churches, democratic majorities, observation and experiment conducted by qualified experts, or the convictions of simple folks uncorrupted by civilisation
this view, in one form or another, is central to western thought, which stems from Plato and his disciples. ~ Isaiah Berlin

Of course the Silicon Valley is unique and Berlin is not yet comparable. But of all the different cities that are building a startup infrastructure, Berlin is the one with the most similar energy. ~ Mark Zuckerberg

When we were negotiating the ongoing financial period in 2013, I talked myself hoarse. London and Berlin in particular insisted on reducing the budget. So we - to the applause of German journalists - made cuts to central future-oriented areas and slashed the budget for development aid, research and technology. ~ Martin Schulz

In your Easter bonnet, with all the frills upon it, you'll be the grandest lady in the Easter parade. ~ Irving Berlin

Taking trains and trams in Berlin, I noticed people reading. Books, I mean - not pocket-size devices that bleep as if censorious, on which even Shakespeare scans like a spreadsheet. ~ Joshua Cohen

There is another, grimmer history to the filibuster, though, one that carries special relevance for me. For almost a century, the filibuster was the South's weapon of choice in its efforts to protect Jim Crow from federal interference, the legal blockade that effectively gutted the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Decade after decade, courtly, erudite men like Senator Richard B Russell of Georgia used the filibuster to choke off any and every piece of civil rights legislation before the Senate, whether voting rights bills, or fair employment bills, or anti-lynching bills. ~ Barack Obama

Of babies born alive and in hospitals during that month of July 1945, 92 percent would die within then days. ~ Andrei Cherny

At some point he seemed to lose all confidence trying to break down the Berlin Wall. He was still fighting as only Kasparov can, but I could see it in his eyes that he knew he wasn't going to win one of these games. ~ Vladimir Kramnik

I remember I went to Berlin right after the Wall came down. I first went to East Berlin, and all the buildings were old and falling down, and now when you go back to Berlin, you know you're in the East because all the buildings are brand new and very tall. ~ Moby

What is Life?
(1) Tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
(2) Dictionary definition in biology (chemical process within organic entities involving metabolism etc.)
(3) Mrs Woolf: 'Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.'
(4) Series of actual and hypothetical behavioural data which differ in certain assignable ways from data defining dead or inanimate entities.
(5) That which the Lord infused into Adam. See Genesis 1. 4 [sc. 2. 7].
Which?
Mental Cramp. ~ Isaiah Berlin

Yet man is born to love. He is compassionate, just and good. He sheds tears for others and such tears give him pleasure. He invents stories to make him weep. Whence then this furious desire for wars and slaughter? Why does man plunge into the abyss, embracing with passion that which inspires him with such loathing? Why do men who revolt over such trivial issues as attempts to change the calendar allow themselves to be sent like obedient animals to kill and be killed? ~ Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber Of Humanity

There was a cabaret, and there was a master of ceremonies... and there was a city called Berlin, in a country called Germany...and it was the end of the world. ~ Joe Masteroff

Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals or groups (or tribes or states or nations or churches) that he or she or they are in sole possession of the truth: especially about how to live, what to be and do - and that those who differ from them are not merely mistaken, but wicked or mad: and need restraining or suppressing. ~ Isaiah Berlin

The moon. There's no other moon like one on a clear New Mexico night. It rises over the Sandias and soothes the miles and miles of barren desert with all the quiet whiteness of a first snow. ~ Lucia Berlin

Berlin was charismatic in the roguish way of a love ... It was a lover who was a little dangerous in ways that didn't always show, keeping you a bit on edge, a bit in love and endlessly forgiving because he made her feel that she was exactly where she was meant to be ... Berlin made you like who you were when you were there, as if everything worth being a part of in the world - all those modern ideas about sex and art and women; all that possibility - was right there, in its dark, beating heart. ~ Whitney Otto

Tolstoy wrote, 'The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.' He understood this service as a religious duty. For me, I understand it as a fact of life, as THE fact of life. What we do for each other is what survives. My sister is dead, but everything she did for me while she was alive is still going strong. I can still feel her hand reaching across the backseat of our car in Berlin, and I still hear her voice, our conversations going late into the night. ~ Nina Sankovitch

No one can compare us to the apartheid regime. It's not like in South Africa between the blacks and the whites who belong to the same nation, or in Berlin where you find parents living on the eastern side and their children in the western side. ~ Silvan Shalom

I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting ... it was the start of a new Arab world.. The Berlin Wall has fallen. ~ Walid Jumblatt

People who have certain types of mental illness have different wiring in their brain. And part of that having a different kind of wiring so to speak could in some sense be related to having a different way of thinking which could produce genius type thoughts. ~ H. A. Berlin

The adidas +Challenge is a really cool opportunity for kids here in Los Angeles and across the country to get excited for the FIFA World Cup this summer. As a big fan of soccer, Im looking forward to seeing the 32 youth teams compete for the title of Team USA and represent our country at the global finals in Berlin. ~ Luke Wilson

The case against the notion of historical objectivity is like the case against international law, or international morality; that it does not exist. ~ Isaiah Berlin

(…) there was terror in the Berlin air – the terror felt by many people with good reason – and Christopher found himself affected by it. Perhaps he was also affected by his own fantasies. He had always posed a little to his friends in England as an embattled fighter against the Nazis and some of them had encouraged him jokingly to do so. "Don't get killed before I come," Edward Upward had written, "I'll see you unless you've been shot by Hitler." Now Christopher began to have mild hallucinations. He fancied that he heard heavy wagons drawing up before the house, in the middle of the night. He suddenly detected swastika patterns in the wallpaper. He convinced hinself that everything in his room, whatever its superficial color, was basically brown, Nazi brown. ~ Christopher Isherwood

That investors should be able to take physical possession of the cotton which underpinned the bonds if the South failed to make its interest payments. Collateral is, after all, only good if a creditor can get his hands on it. And that is why the fall of New Orleans in April 1862 was the real turning point in the American Civil War. With the South's main port in Union hands, any investor who wanted to get hold of Southern cotton had to run the Union's naval blockade not once but twice, in and out. ~ Niall Ferguson

When I was an undergraduate we were told that history had ended, and we all believed it. When the Berlin Wall fell, what history was made of was over. No more Cold War. No more wars. And yet here it was, and is and all of it falling apart. Endings. Worlds dissolving. Weather systems, baking systems, the careful plans of municipal gardeners. Families, hearts, lives. ~ Helen Macdonald

[B]inary opposites fit nicely the formulation of history as written, but they do little to capture the messy, inchoate reality of history as lived. ~ Ira Berlin

State philosophy reposes on a double identity: of the thinking subject, and of the concepts it creates and to which it lends its own presumed attributes of sameness and constancy. The subjects, its concepts, and also the objects in the world to which the concepts are applied have a shared, internal essence: the self-resemblance at the basis of identity. Representational thought is analogical; its concern is to establish a correspondence between these symmetrically structured domains. The faculty of judgment is the policeman of analogy, assuring that each of these terms is honestly itself, and that the proper correspondences obtain. In thought its end is truth, in action justice. The weapons it wields in their pursuit are limitive distribution (the determination of the exclusive set of properties possessed by each term in contradistinction to the others: logos, law) and hierarchical ranking (the measurement of the degree of perfection of a term's self-resemblance in relation to a supreme standard, man, god, or gold: value, morality). The modus operandi is negation: x = x = not y. Identity, resemblance, truth, justice, and negation. The rational foundation for order. The established order, of course: philosophers have traditionally been employees of the State. The collusion between philosophy and the State was most explicitly enacted in the first decade of the nineteenth century with the foundation of the University of Berlin, which was to become the model of higher learning th ~ Gilles Deleuze

When the others were picked up and walked home by friends or fathers or best friend's sisters,
I was the kid in a grey hoodie, walking with the poets, the singers, the thinkers, and I was not alone. ~ Charlotte Eriksson

The fall of the Berlin Wall on 11/9/89 unleashed forces that ultimately liberated all the captive peoples of the Soviet Empire ~ Thomas L. Friedman

There was one activity that Bonhoeffer would enjoy in Barcelona, but could never enjoy in Berlin. That was the arte taurina (bull fighting). Though an aesthete and an intellectual, Bonhoeffer was neither effete nor squeamish. His brother Klaus arrived for a visit on Easter Saturday, and on Easter afternoon - Bonhoeffer preached that morning - they were "dragged" by a German teacher, presumably Thumm, to the "great Easter corrida." He ~ Eric Metaxas

The Romanovs inhabit a world of family rivalry, imperial ambition, lurid glamour, sexual excess and depraved sadism; this is a world where obscure strangers suddenly claim to be dead monarchs reborn, brides are poisoned, fathers torture their sons to death, sons kill fathers, wives murder husbands, a holy man, poisoned and shot, arises, apparently, from the dead, barbers and peasants ascend to supremacy, giants and freaks are collected, dwarfs are tossed, beheaded heads kissed, tongues torn out, flesh knouted off bodies, rectums impaled, children slaughtered; here are fashion-mad nymphomaniacal empresses, lesbian ménage à trois, and an emperor who wrote the most erotic correspondence ever written by a head of state. Yet this is also the empire built by flinty conquistadors and brilliant statesmen that conquered Siberia and Ukraine, took Berlin and Paris, and produced Pushkin, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky and Dostoevsky; a civilization of towering culture and exquisite beauty. ~ Simon Sebag Montefiore

In Berlin evil came to them slowly and then all at once. ~ Alice Hoffman

Berlin is still going through a transition since the Cold War - both in what used to be East and West Berlin. I can still sense the confusion and the struggle for identity there in the streets. There's a pulse to it. ~ Diane Kruger

Berlin stimulates like arsenic. ~ Harold Nicolson