German History Quotes

I am imprinted with the whole sense of European history, especially German history, going back to World War I, which really destroyed all the old values and culture. My grandparents had been reasonably well-off but they became quite poor, living in an attic apartment. ~ Lisel Mueller

Any alliance whose purpose is not the intention to wage war is senseless and useless. ~ Adolf Hitler

The mere fact that my comments have caused such strong protests, although I'm not a European, and also the fact that I have been compared with certain persons in German history indicates how charged with conflict the atmosphere for research is in your country. Here in Iran you needn't worry. ~ Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Dachau-the significance of this name will never be erased from German history. It stands for all concentration camps which the Nazis established in their territory. ~ Eugen Kogon

In 1914... [German] history, poetry, dream and the individual moment were all combined in one exhilarating sensation...The nation was a creation of one's imagination, a poetic truth, an ethical, not a social, construct... blind obedience was the true value... the stronger a person is... the more he obeys. ~ Modris Eksteins, The Rites Of Spring

Suppressed I Rise is for anyone interested in a very personal, human view of the history of World War II. A mother's attempt to protect and raise her two young daughters in hostile NAZI Germany challenges her sensibilities and resourcefulness. ~ Hank Bracker

Throughout the history of the Deutschritter the German genius is very evident, romantic idealism implemented with utter ruthlessness. ~ Desmond Seward

When has there ever been a government in German history that came to the people and revealed its detailed plans for the coming years? That could not happen before, since German governments planned war and conquest. ~ Walter Ulbricht

It was the economy that troubled most people prior to World War II. Europe, especially Germany, was dealing with a deep worldwide depression. Fascism was gaining a stronghold in Germany as well as in many other European countries. Although small and generally not popular, the Communist Party was the only organized group to stand in opposition to the Nazis. Small bands of these Communists occasionally attempted to disrupt the government by rioting in the streets. Occasionally gunfire would be heard, but very little could be done about it by a people that did not want to get involved. Hitler's "Brown Shirts" were rapidly solidifying their position, and the Nazi Party was becoming stronger. Even though they frequently violated the National Constitution, they brought order to what had been chaos. The Treaty of Versailles, enacted after World War I, was hated by the German people, who felt that it suppressed them in a most demeaning way. However now Hitler was putting people to work building cars and an autobahn highway system that connected the larger cities. Modernization of airports and the development of a national railroad were all in violation of the imposed international regulations. Workers were again bringing paychecks home and could once more feed their families. Therefore, little thought was given to Hitler's power grab. Germany was emerging from the dark era following World War I, and things were getting better. The Vaterland was regaining its strength, without regard ~ Hank Bracker

I knew German history well, and out of my experiences in the rest of the world I believed to know the German kind; therefore I never doubted that, although for the time being all indications were against it, one day a change would come. ~ Gustav Krupp

Historians usually focus their attention on the past of countries that still exist, writing hundreds and thousands of books on British history, French history, German history, Russian history, American history, Chinese history, Indian history, Brazilian history or whatever. Whether consciously or not, they are seeking the roots of the present, thereby putting themselves in danger of reading history backwards. As soon as great powers arise, whether the United States in the twentieth century or China in the twenty-first, the call goes out for offerings on American History or Chinese History, and siren voices sing that today's important countries are also those whose past is most deserving of examination, that a more comprehensive spectrum of historical knowledge can be safely ignored. ~ Norman Davies

Ribbentrop brushed aside the Jewish extermination events. He said that in the long view, historically, the Jews' extermination would always be a blot on German history, but that it was in a way attributable to the fact that Hitler had lost his sense of proportion and, because he was losing the war, went "wild" on the subject of the Jews. But the big historical issue was not that Jews had been exterminated but that Germany had really been oppressed and never given a chance. ~ Leon Goldensohn

Think of the press as a great keyboard
on which the government can play. ~ Joseph Goebbels

God grant that this is the work of the Communists. You are witnessing the beginning of a great new epoch in German history. This fire is the beginning. ~ Adolf Hitler

Sitting at the table were three Russian prisoners of war that had been assigned to work on her husband's farm. Hesitantly, we sat down with these men. I couldn't understand a word they said and I couldn't know the awful circumstances under which I would see them again. We stayed at the farm that entire day and she let us sleep in a nice large bed, tucked under the eaves of the attic. It would have been perfect except that we didn't have any pillows or blankets but at least there wasn't a corpse in bed with us! The nights were getting cold this time of year, besides the Russians had made me feel considerably uncomfortable. When I asked her about her neighbors she avoided the question and so I thought it best to continue our search, in hopes of a better place to stay. ~ Hank Bracker

The world, however, is indebted to Germany in a terrifying way, because she demonstrated to everyone what the ultimate conclusions of negative and destructive ideas really are. Ideas which in London or New York are repeated as seemingly harmless abstractions have been shown up by the Germans in all their blood-chilling finality. In this sense Nazi Germany has become the Gorgonian Mirror in which a decadent West could study its own features. ~ Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Universal education is the most corroding and disintegrating poison that liberalism has ever invented for its own destruction. ~ Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler and his Brownshirts had surged to power. Now they held Germany by the throat. The Gestapo was rapidly creating a cruel and brutal police state that treated all but true Aryans like dogs and swine. That was certainly true for Jews like the Weisz family. In just the last few years, they and all of the Jewish families in Germany had been stripped of their citizenship and denied many of their most basic rights. Jacob's father, an esteemed professor of German history, had been summarily fired from his prestigious post at Frederick William University in Berlin. The Weisz family had been forced out of their beautiful, spacious home in the suburbs of the capital. They'd had a big red J stamped on their official papers and had been denied permission to leave the country. So they had left Berlin and made a new home in Siegen. ~ Joel C. Rosenberg

I do not believe that one can maintain a situation in which a man toils and works a whole year, only to get a ludicrous salary, and another just sits down in a leather seat and gets enormous sums for it. This is a condition unworthy of man. [-] After all, there are two worlds which confront each other. And they are right when they say: "We can never reconcile ourselves to the National Socialist world." For how could a narrow-minded capitalist possibly declare his agreement with my principles? It would be easier for the devil to go to church and take holy water. [-] This is the first state in our German history which, as a matter of principle, eliminated all social prejudice in the assignment of social positions, and this not only in civilian life. I myself am the best proof of that. I am not even an advocate; just think of what this means! And still I am your Fuhrer! [-] What was it that I asked of the outside world Nothing but the right of Germans to unite, and second, that what was taken away from them be restored. I asked for nothing which might have implied a loss for another people.

How often have I offered my hand to them Immediately after my rise to power. For what does armament mean? It gobbles up so much manpower. And especially I who regard work as the decisive factor, I had wished to employ German manpower for other plans.

And, my Volksgenossen, I believe it became common knowledge that I have plans of some substance, beautiful and great plans ~ Adolf Hitler

When someone asked Bonhoeffer whether he shouldn't join the German Christians in order to work against them from within, he answered that he couldn't. 'If you board the wrong train,' he said, 'it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction. ~ Eric Metaxas

Education is something which should be apart from the necessities of earning a living, not a tool therefor. It needs contemplation, fallow periods, the measured and guided study of the history of man's reiteration of the most agonizing question of all: Why? ~ John D. MacDonald

History is the sum of the people living it. ~ Ben Orlin

The intriguing history of American applied toponymy includes a few notoriously unpopular sweeping decisions a year after President Benjamin Harrison created the Board on Geographic Names in 1890. Harrison acted at the behest of several government agencies, including the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, which was responsible for mapping the nation's coastline, harbors, and coastal waterways. Troubled by inconsistencies in spelling, board members voted to replace centre with center, drop the ugh from names ending in orough, and shorten the suffix burgh to burg. Overnight, Centreview (in Mississippi) became Centerview, Isleborough (in Maine) became Isleboro, and Pittsburgh (in Pennsylvania) lost its final h and a lot of civic pride. The city was chartered in 1816 as Pittsburg, but the Post Office Department added the extra letter sometime later. Although both spellings were used locally and the shorter version had been the official name, many Pittsburghers complained bitterly about the cost of reprinting stationery and repainting signs. Making the spelling consistent with Harrisburg, they argued, was hardly a good reason for truncating the Iron City's moniker--although Harrisburg was the state capital, it was a smaller and economically less important place. Local officials protested that the board had exceeded its authority. The twenty-year crusade to restore the final h bore fruit in 1911, when the board reversed itself--but only for Pittsburgh. In ~ Mark Monmonier

Fiction is the history of the obscure. ~ Jill Lepore

I told Ing once that she dances like a German and she didn't like it, but it's true: she dances seriously, like lives are hanging in the balance, like precision dancing can save the starving children of India. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

As for the Republicans
how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage' ... ) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

What made Obama unique was that he was the ultimate charismatic politician
the most unknown stranger ever to achieve the presidency in the United States. No one knew who he was, he came out of nowhere, he had this incredible persona that floated him above the fray, destroyed Hillary, took over the Democratic Party and became president. This is truly unprecedented: A young unknown with no history, no paper trail, no well-known associates, self-created. ~ Charles Krauthammer

It's an old story; it's as old as our history. The difference between Democrats and Republicans has always been measured in courage and confidence. The Republicans believe that the wagon train will not make it to the frontier unless some of the old, some of the young, some of the weak, are left behind by the side of the trail. The strong, the strong they tell us, will inherit the land. We Democrats believe in something else. We Democrats believe that we can make it all the way with the whole family intact, and we have more than once. ~ Mario Cuomo

We teach in our cultural history that the entire universe is a family. So our association with Nature is much deeper and of a very different kind. ~ Narendra Modi

My interest in writing about American history stemmed originally, I think, from a subconscious desire to find roots - I felt like a girl without a country. I have put down roots quite firmly by now, but in the process, I have discovered the joys of research and am probably hooked. ~ Jean Fritz

If I'm going to Hell, I'm going there playing the piano. ~ Jerry Lee Lewis

Many of the most obvious conflicts between science and religion involve timing issues - the dating of events in Earth's history. Bible chronologies typically list Adam and Eve at about 4,000 BC. In contrast, science textbooks can hardly be found that do not refer to human or "pre-human" remains 10,000 to millions of years old. Why the discrepancy? ~ David Barker

You studied history. You know this. Everybody's history is one long slog of all the horrible shit we've done to each other.' 'It's ~ Becky Chambers

History is not just cruel. It is witty. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Exile in a real place, a place of few bodies and many stones, is just an extension (a packaging) of the other exile, the state of being separated from whatever is left of the center of one's own history ~ Don DeLillo

It is a moment that has no meaning. It is as if the tired charade of human life with its great pursuits and history and wounds and deep convictions has collapsed, and the world has been suddenly revealed as a place that has no point, that does not need the hypothesis of meaning to explain its existence. ~ Manu Joseph

. . . [A]ny history that deals with the efforts of the populace to defend itself from the abuses of wealth and tyranny is people's history . . . A people's history should be not only an account of popular struggle against oppression but an exposé of the anti-people's history that has prevailed among generations of mainstream historians. It should be a critical history about a people's oppressors, those who propagated an elitist ideology and a loathing of the common people that distorts the historical record down to this day. ~ Michael Parenti

What does this have to do with me?" It was interesting history, but she didn't know why it was relevant. "Why did the West want Windwalkers?" Lord Ophain returned her question with a question. She was beginning to see where Aldrik got his teaching style from. ~ Elise Kova

Finally, Europe's post-war history is a story shadowed by silences; by absence. The continent of Europe was once an intricate, interwoven tapestry of overlapping languages, religions, communities and nations. Many of its cities - particularly the smaller ones at the intersection of old and new imperial boundaries, such as Trieste, Sarajevo, Salonika, Cernovitz, Odessa or Vilna - were truly multicultural societies avant le mot, where Catholics, Orthodox, Muslims, Jews and others lived in familiar juxtaposition. We should not idealise this old Europe. What the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski called 'the incredible, almost comical melting-pot of peoples and nationalities sizzling dangerously in the very heart of Europe' was periodically rent with riots, massacres and pogroms - but it was real, and it survived into living memory.
Between 1914 and 1945, however, that Europe was smashed into the dust. The tidier Europe that emerged, blinking, into the second half of the twentieth century had fewer loose ends. Thanks to war, occupation, boundary adjustments, expulsions and genocide, almost everybody now lived in their own country, among their own people. For forty years after World War Two Europeans in both halves of Europe lived in hermetic national enclaves where surviving religious or ethnic minorities the Jews in France, for example - represented a tiny percentage of the population at large and were thoroughly integrated into its cultural and political mainstream. Only Yugos ~ Tony Judt

In the German football team players from different clubs need to get on with each other both on and off the pitch. In the grand coalition Christian Democrats and Social Democrats sit in the same boat and need to pull in the same direction. ~ Angela Merkel

I gave myself a few days back at home before going in to see my clients again. It was hard at first. And it stayed hard for months. To sit there quietly, hands folded in my lap, listening to them elaborate on their troubles. An old impatience returned, the kind I had experienced when I started as a therapist: the urge to search for the moments in their past that contained the key to liberating them in the present. That's why I used to do, press for more and more family history, excusing it to myself as interest and attention, when really it was a distraction from the suffering in front of me, a desire to find the passage of experience that would explain their pain away. What good plot didn't offer that? A meaning sufficient to account for the events. But as time went on, I realized that my clients' lives weren't works of art. They told themselves stories all the time, but the stories trailed off, got forgetting, and then repeated - distractions themselves, oftentimes, from the feelings they were somewhere taught would damn them or wreck them.

It had taken me a long time to see how strong this desire for an answer was. I had to train myself to notice how it arose, and how to put it aside. Because if all I did was scour what a person said to me each week for clues, I wouldn't do her much good. I had to give up my own need to cure if I was going to stand any chance of shepherding her toward acceptance of who she already was.

I never did that for Michael. I ~ Adam Haslett

Quality sex is only possible with true sexual equality. We've never--at any point in Western history--had a time where the majority of the population valued women's ways of orgasm as equal to a man's. It's time to change history. ~ Laurie Mintz

Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources. ~ Nick Land

Once you uncover the history of this pattern and trace its roots, you will see that your reaction in the present moment is really a reaction from the past, a shadow character's attempt to protect you from reexperiencing an old emotional wound, which instead sabotages you in the present. ~ Connie Zweig

Time will inevitably uncover dishonesty and lies; history has no place for them. ~ Norodom Sihanouk

Doona always believe everything you read, especially history written by the conquerors of a nation, ... ~ Donna Grant

'Britain's Royal Families' became my first published book, in 1989, from The Bodley Head, and the rest of the story is - dare I say it? - history! ~ Alison Weir

What I really like about law is that it's not an endless discourse like history or philosophy. In law, there comes a point where problems have to be solved, and cases decided. ~ Bernhard Schlink

DNA isn't destiny - it's history. ~ Anonymous

The nature of Christ's existence is mysterious, I admit; but this mystery meets the wants of man. Reject it, and the world is an inexplicable riddle; believe it, and the history of our race is satisfactorily explained. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

Evolution on the large scale unfolds, like much of human history, as a succession of dynasties. ~ Edmund Beecher Wilson

Slavery isn't Black history," I point out. "It's everyone's history." A ~ Jodi Picoult

Tesla," the vicar mused. "That's a foreign name, is it not? Hungarian,
is it?"
"Serbian," I corrected him. "I'm afraid the - shire Teslas are a
scant three centuries in these parts, having constructed Tesla Hall in
the reign of Queen Elizabeth.We are a restless people, and no doubt
will be moving on again any century now. ~ Vinnie Tesla

The town draws a veil over certain events. This is a small community where everyone knows that sometimes the contract to forget is as important as any promise to remember. Children can grow up having no knowledge of the indiscretion of their father in his youth or the illegitimate sibling who lives fifty miles away and bears another man's name. History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent. That's how life goes on; protected by the silence that anaesthetises shame. ~ M.L. Stedman

History is just the present in retrospect. Times change but people do not. ~ Jeanne C. Stein