Garmendia German Quotes

I'm not big on material things, but I like my cars. They are German-made and custom-made. ~ Dirk Nowitzki

The missionaries of Christianity had said in effect: You have no right to live among us as Jews. The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed: You have no right to live among us. The German Nazis at last decreed: You have no right to live. ~ Raul Hilberg

Mindy Sue, you are a pretty, lively, successful female, fluent in French and German. You are a professional woman but also sportif. You care buckets, I can see that. How did you get yourself in this terrible predicament? How did you become a four-line seventy-five-cents-a-word advertisement in the back pages of The New York Review of Books? ~ Donald Barthelme

The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann once observed that the simple act of asking yourself, "Where did I put my keys?" performs unexpected magic: it transforms the world into a catalog of possible key locations.1 Under the couch, somewhere the dog or the baby moved ~ Ian Bogost

I'm an American. You can't go on where you were born. If you do then John McEnroe would be a German. ~ Martina Navratilova

Life in the trenches has been well documented, though mostly from the point of view of the victors. Especially in the English-language literature on World War I, there is not a huge amount that captures the experiences of the ordinary German soldier. The present translation of my grandfather's memoirs of his time on the Western Front may offer some redress. ~ Gunther Simmermacher

We told each other every funny story we could think of. One of them stays in my mind. A German citizen wants to commit suicide. He tries to hang himself, but the rope is of such a poor quality that it breaks. He tries to drown himself, but the percentage of wood in the fabric of his pants is so high that he floats on the surface like a raft. Finally he starves to death from eating official government rations. ~ Edith Hahn Beer

Now, I will drink no German beer. The white wine of the country, with a little soda-water; perhaps occasionally a glass of Ems or potash. But beer, never - or, at all events, hardly ever." It is a good and useful resolution, which I recommend to all travellers. I ~ Jerome K. Jerome

Paine and Joel Barlow attempted to change Jefferson's mind, urging him to settle thrifty German immigrants in the new lands and to permit black families to travel from other states to acquire their own land there, but the sugar interest triumphed, ~ Christopher Hitchens

One German officer lived in the house opposite ours. He had a room with the Kahn family. They said he was a charming man - calm, likable, polite, and sympathetic. Three days after he moved in he brought Madame Kahn a box of chocolates. The optimists rejoiced. ~ Elie Wiesel

A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means - the only complete realist.15 ~ Tad R. Callister

The Catholic struggle to hold the line against Protestantism brought thirty years of misery to millions of Europeans: opinions vary, but within the German lands one modern estimate is that 40 per cent of the population met an early death through the fighting or the accompanying famine and disease, and even the most cautious reassessment of the evidence comes up with a figure of 15-20 per cent. ~ Diarmaid MacCulloch

My father had drawn number 3,004 in a death lottery in which German precision trumped Nazi brutality. ~ Leonard Mlodinow

There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry. ~ Mark Twain

Mujo is a refugee in Germany, has no job, but has a lot of time, so he goes to a Turkish bath. The bath is full of German businessmen with towels around their waists, huffing and puffing, but every once in a while a cell phone rings and they pull their phone out from under the towel and say, Bitte? Mujo seems to be the only one without a cell phone, so he goes to the bathroom and stuffs toilet paper up his butt. He walks back out, a long trail of toilet paper behind him. So a German says, you have some paper, Herr, sticking out behind you. Oh, Mujo says, it looks like I have received a fax. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people. ~ Wafa Sultan

The years 1781 to 1793 are crucial for many reasons, but chiefly because they pose in an especially clear way the main problem of German philosophy for the next century. This is the old conflict between reason and faith which recurred during the pantheism controversy between Jacobi and Mendelssohn. ~ Frederick C. Beiser

The First World War began because one man was shot. The Second World War began because of a mad German dictator. Who knows how a third could start. There are also people who think that the war has been going for a long time. ~ Ronald Lauder

I can't be on too long before I have to stop. If she hadn't left, you'd both be home right now."

Victoria's brow wrinkled.

"I don't understand."

"You take energy from people, from crowds, and you expend more. For you, when you're on, you run like a German engine, no?"

"Right."

"When you go home after the party's over and you haven't had enough attention, you miss it. You crave more."

"Right."

"I don't take in energy like that. People take energy from me. I can be social, I can be on, but I go home for silence and solitude, not because it's time for the party to end. I don't want to hear another person's voice for three days so I can recharge. Like a battery. ~ Moriah Jovan

Torture?" Primrose's tone was thoughtful. "Cold tea?" "German poetry." Percy reached to a shelf and offered up an unpleasantly fat leather-bound volume. Rue was arrested. "There's such a thing as German poetry?" Primrose nodded seriously. "Yes. Save yourself. ~ Gail Carriger

When we walked down the aisle, they played Taco Bell's Canyon, Quinn says knowingly. (Named for its German composer, Johann TacoBell.) ~ Michael Lewis

In Germany to-day one hears a good deal concerning Socialism, but it is a Socialism that would only be despotism under another name. Individualism makes no appeal to the German voter. He is willing, nay, anxious to be controlled and regulated in all things.

'You get yourself born,' says the German Government to the German citizen, 'we do the rest. Indoors and out of doors, in sickness and in health, in pleasure and in work, we will tell you what to do, and we will see to it that you do it. Don't you worry yourself anything.'

And the German doesn't.

[published in 1900] ~ Jerome K. Jerome

The German writer Goethe said, "We are shaped and fashioned by what we love." "We ~ Austin Kleon

There was a big number over the door of the building. The number was five. Before the Americans could go inside, their only English-speaking guard told them to memorize their simple address, in case they got lost in the big city. Their address was this: 'Schlachthof-fünf.' Schlachthof means slaughterhouse. Fünf was good old five. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I am bored. The great things are done. The German Reich is made. ~ Otto Von Bismarck

The great German scholar Helmut Thielicke once said that a person who speaks to this hour's need will always be skirting the edge of heresy, but only the person who risks those heresies can gain the truth. ~ Rob Bell

The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I'll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction - until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define "literature". The Latin root simply means "letters". Those letters are either delivered - they connect with an audience - or they don't. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that's because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books - and thus what they count as literature - really tells you more about them than it does about the book. ~ Brent Weeks

How strange that there would be exactly twenty-four German carpenters in Chicago when the all-night manicure place on the corner of Oakley and Lawrence is called "24/7 Nails. ~ John Green

I am stretching out this volume, since those German dogs estimate the value of books by their cubic contents. ~ Karl Marx

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness - they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means - the only complete realist. ~ C.S. Lewis

We were facing a great number of uncertainties and dangers. First, whether the Russians would treat us decently, us who had lived through the German occupation; whether the survivors from Transnistria would come back; how many had survived the retreat of the Germans; whether our friends and relatives in the Russian army and those who had fled voluntarily would come home; whether any of them had survived the almost three years of war; whether we'll have food to survive. The Russian military, in pursuit of the retreating Germans, were angry, aggressive and contemptuous of the local population. The ubiquitous question: Why did they kill all the other Jews and left you alive? That thought implied that the survivors were all collaborators of the Nazis, whether they were Jewish or not. ~ Pearl Fichman

Germany will regard the Jewish question as solved only after the very last Jew has left the greater German living space ... Europe will have its Jewish question solved only after the very last Jew has left the continent. ~ Alfred Rosenberg

Germany no longer feels bound by the Locarno Treaty. In the interest of the primitive rights of its people to the security of their frontier and the safeguarding of their defence, the German Government has re-established, as from today, the absolute and unrestricted sovereignty of the Reich in the demilitarized zone!" Now the six hundred deputies, personal appointees all of Hitler, little men with big bodies and bulging necks and cropped hair and pouched bellies and brown uniforms and heavy boots, little men of clay in his fine hands, leap to their feet like automatons, their right arms upstretched in the Nazi salute, and scream Heils, the first two or three wildly, the next twenty-five in unison, like a college yell. Hitler raises his hand for silence. It comes slowly. Slowly the automatons sit down. Hitler now has them in his claws. He appears to sense it. He says in a deep, resonant voice: "Men of the German Reichstag!" The silence is utter. ~ William L. Shirer

They took Einstein to the process department, where they had a Ford set up on a scaffolding. He and Mrs. Einstein sat in it and the cameramen filmed them while, unbeknownst to the Einstein's, projecting an aerial film of New York, Niagra Falls, Chicago, and Los Angeles behind them. Then they developed this film of the Einstein's flying over America in a Ford and showed it. Einstein stared at it and kept saying in German, "My god, what have they done? I don't understand." My father said, "Relativity he understands!"
-Jack Warner, Jr. ~ Jean Stein

In early times some sufferer had to sit up with a toothache, and he put in the time inventing the German language. ~ Mark Twain

he guessed this was a Welsh regiment. The flare died. Walter leaped to his feet and ran, heading for the German side. The sentry would be unable to see for a few seconds, his vision spoiled by the flare. Walter ran faster than he ever had, expecting the rifle to fire again at any moment. In half a minute he came to the British wire and dropped gratefully to his knees. He crawled rapidly forward through a gap. Another flare went up. ~ Ken Follett

An unusual problem developed when a case of smallpox was brought to the hospital. Smallpox was too contagious to be allowed on the wards. Its victims had to be specially isolated. But where? Osler drove the patient up to the mayor of Hamilton's home, a sure way of getting action. Special accommodation was arranged in a secluded house. Osler visited the patient twice a day until he died, and then did an autopsy on the spot, helped by the German housekeeper. ~ Michael Bliss

Per capita the East Germans drank more than twice as much as their West German counterparts. ~ Anna Funder

It seems manifest, then, that the latter tongue (German) ought to be trimmed down and repaired. If it is to remain as it is, it ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages, for only the dead have time to learn it. ~ Mark Twain

There's more than a few remnants left in German welfare policy today. Many Germans eagerly condemn Hitler's fascism but won't examine the other reasons why the Third Reich succeeded for a season. ~ Suzanne Fields