Germany Quotes

It is the emotions to which one objects in Germany most of all. ~ Franz Grillparzer

What's the news of the war?' The doctor twisted the ends of his moustache and said, 'Germany is taking everything, the Italians are playing the fool, the French have run away, the Belgians have been overrun whilst they were looking the other way, the Poles have been charging tanks with cavalry, the Americans have been playing baseball, the British have been drinking tea and adjusting their monocles, the Russians have been sitting on their hands except when voting unanimously to do whatever they are told. Thank God we are out of it. Why don't we turn on the radio? ~ Louis De Bernieres

In this day and age, the digital age, you can forget about a resume; you are what your social media says about you. ~ Germany Kent

There is no doubt that the countries that now have a very large debt have not introduced the kind of structural reforms that Germany did and are therefore at a disadvantage. But the problem is that this disadvantage is becoming even more pronounced through the punitive policies in place. ~ George Soros

I claimed identity as Jewish musicians for political reasons, because most of us were touring in Germany and, at this time, twelve years ago, there was a strong resurgence of Nazism in the places we were touring and part of that was on the music scene. ~ Marc Ribot

Europe was not born in the early Middle Ages. No common identity in 1000 linked Spain to Russia, Ireland to the Byzantine empire (in what is now the Balkans, Greece and Turkey), except the very weak sense of community that linked Christian polities together. There was no common European culture, and certainly not any Europe-wide economy. There was no sign whatsoever that Europe would, in a still rather distant future, develop economically and militarily, so as to be able to dominate the world. Anyone in 1000 looking for future industrialization would have put bets on the economy of Egypt, not of the Rhineland and Low Countries, and that of Lancashire would have seemed like a joke. In politico-military terms, the far south-east and south-west of Europe, Byzantium and al-Andalus (Muslim Spain), provided the dominant states of the Continent, whereas in western Europe the Carolingian experiment (see below, Chapters 16 and 17) had ended with the break-up of Francia (modern France, Belgium and western Germany), the hegemonic polity for the previous four hundred years. The most coherent western state in 1000, southern England, was tiny. In fact, weak political systems dominated most of the Continent at the end of our period, and the active and aggressive political systems of later on in the Middle Ages were hardly visible.

National identities, too, were not widely prominent in 1000, even if one rejects the association between nationalism and modernity made in much contemp ~ Chris Wickham

If Germany won it would change the course of our civilization and make the United States a military nation [and] it would check his policy for a better international ethical code ~ Woodrow Wilson

This is the BBC in London. You will now hear a statement from the Prime Minister." "I am speaking to you from the Cabinet room, Ten Downing Street. This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note, stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o'clock, that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now, that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently, this country is at war with Germany. ~ Jeffrey Archer

And I don't really have anyone upon whom I want to rain down my wrath, I said, because in truth I didn't. I always felt like you had to be important to have enemies. Example: Historically, Germany has had more enemies than Luxembourg, Margo Roth Spiegelman was Germany. And Great Britain. And the United States. And czarist Russia. Me, I'm Luxembourg. Just sitting around, tending sheep, and yodeling. ~ John Green

Alongside the viciousness of much of German politics in the Weimar years was an incongruous innocence: few people could imagine the worst possibilities. A civilized nation could not possibly vote for Hitler, some had thought. When he became chancellor nonetheless, millions expected his time in office to be short and ineffectual. Germany was a notoriously law-abiding as well as cultured land. How could a German government systematically brutalize its own people? German Jews were highly assimilated and patriotic. Many refused to leave their homeland, even as things got worse and worse. "I am German and am waiting for the Germans to come back; they have gone to ground somewhere," Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary--he was the son of a rabbi and a veteran of the First World War who chose to stay, and miraculously survived.

Few Germans in 1933 could imagine Treblinka or Auschwitz, the mass shootings of Babi Yar or the death marches of the last months of the Second World War. It is hard to blame them for not foreseeing the unthinkable. Yet their innocence failed them, and they were catastrophically wrong about their future. We who come later have one advantage over them: we have their example before us. ~ Benjamin Carter Hett

So I captured Italy ... but the only thing I hear from him is ze singing und ze laughing und vierd accents.
-Germany ~ Hidekaz Himaruya

Mr. Shaw came for a short time recently to be regarded less as an author than as an incident in the European War. In the opinion of many people it seemed as if the Allies were fighting against a combination composed of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Mr. Shaw. ~ Robert Wilson Lynd

For fun, we sometimes unofficially changed our names when we crossed country borders, with such variations as Jean-Pierre and Fifi (France), Hans and Heidi (Germany and Austria), Carlos and Carlotta (Spain), Sergio and Sophia (Italy), Dominic and Nehru (Romania), and Mary and Josepf (Poland). This helped us get in the spirit of each new country. ~ Dan Krull

Today humankind has broken the law of the jungle. There is at last real peace, and not just absence of war. For most polities, there is no plausible scenario leading to full-scale conflict within one year. What could lead to war between Germany and France next year? Or between China and Japan? Or between Brazil and Argentina? Some minor border clash might occur, but only a truly apocalyptic scenario could result in an old-fashioned full-scale war between Brazil and Argentina in 2014, with Argentinian armoured divisions sweeping to the gates of Rio, and Brazilian carpet-bombers pulverising the neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires. Such wars might still erupt between several pairs of states, e.g. between Israel and Syria, Ethiopia and Eritrea, or the USA and Iran, but these are only the exceptions that prove the rule. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

My mother and I were part of a deal in the mid-'60s between Romania and Israel. Israel bought freedom for Romanian Jews for $2,000 a head. Ceausescu made a bundle in hard currency. He also 'sold' ethnic Germans to West Germany. Instead of going to Israel, my mother and I came to the United States. ~ Andrei Codrescu

Saint Paul lives in the Christian imagination as the chief sponsor of Christian contempt for Jews, the avatar of law versus grace, flesh versus spirit, works versus faith, Moses versus Jesus, the Old Covenant versus the New. This brutal dichotomizing was attributed to Paul most influentially by Martin Luther, who used a perceived Jewish legalism, materialism, and obsession with externals as stand-ins for the decadence of his nemesis, the pope. "Because the Papists, like the Jews," he wrote, "insist that anyone wishing to be saved must observe their ceremonies, they will perish like the Jews."39 After Luther, both Protestants and Catholics read Paul as the preeminent tribune of Jewish corruption - a misreading that had terrible consequences, especially in Luther's Germany, where the Volk were defined in ontological opposition to Juden. Paul's ~ James Carroll

We won't make the weak stronger by making the strong weaker, as a very wise man once said. That applies to the economy as well. If Germany were less competitive, the euro area as a whole would lose, because less could be produced then. ~ Mario Draghi

Hip hop has always been, for us, for artists who are pure to the craft - any place overseas, whether it's Australia, any place in Asia, Germany, Africa, it becomes something where you can still go and work. Hip hop is an import culture. We're spoiled by it here. It's homegrown. ~ Talib Kweli

We will not send troops. Germany is not committed to Iraq - we will not commit ourselves with troops. ~ Joschka Fischer

Something very unique about Germany is that once you are suspected or accused of having worked for the Stassi, it doesn't matter if you were 18-years-old, or a child, or an adult back then. Even if you deny it you won't get rid of this suspicion. ~ Christian Schwochow

Just imagine going to war over Danzig - such a world catastrophe, just to prevent Germany from getting a piece of territory that belonged to her; because Britain was afraid of Germany getting too strong. ~ Joachim Von Ribbentrop

Germany was the centerpiece in Western and Eastern Europe in both wars. ~ Anonymous

I needed to talk to my dad. My dad who had been to war, who had seen its horrors, who suffered from its nightmares, my dad who was a good man, the best man I'd ever known, who, along with my uncle, I wanted to honor by teaching military kids - my dad, the only one who I would believe if he would just tell me I could be good, too, that I could do right by my students, because for sure they were going to suffer. It's just cause and effect. We're at war. The military fights wars. I teach military kids. I'd never served, but now I could make a difference. I just needed my dad to tell me what to do, to tell me I was good enough to get it done. ~ Tucker Elliot

You know the Dutch, they're always a bit funny ... some of them. ~ Franz Beckenbauer

The more comprehensive and convincing a debt reduction program is, the less likely it is to fail. And remember, just as Germany is grateful to America for the Marshall Plan, Italy would be grateful to Germany for helping it lower its refinancing costs. ~ George Soros

We Germans will never produce another Goethe, but we may produce another Caesar. ~ Oswald Spengler

At the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century in Austria, there was a lot of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism in Austria was much more pervasive than in Germany. And Austrians took to Nazi ideas and anti-Semitism much more readily than Germans did, really. ~ Viggo Mortensen

As for the role of France and Germany: French politics is often more self-confident then German politics due to the catastrophe in the first half of the last century. If Berlin and Paris don't agree, then it is difficult to make progress in Europe. ~ Wolfgang Schauble

I like my coffee black, my beer from Germany, wine from Burgundy, the darker, the better. I like my heroes complicated and brooding, James Dean in oiled leather, leaning on a motorcycle. You know the color. ("Ode to Chocolate") ~ Barbara Crooker

Eating in Germany is easy, because there is basically only one kind of food, called the wurst. ~ Dave Barry

A country is mostly the people in it," Maud said. "I don't love England. My parents died a long time ago, and my brother has disowned me. I love Germany. For me, Germany is my wonderful husband, Walter; my misguided son, Erik; my alarmingly capable daughter, Carla; our maid, Ada, and her disabled son; my friend Monika and her family; my journalistic colleagues . . . I'm staying, to fight the Nazis. ~ Ken Follett

What I said was Britain was ready for another Hitler, which is quite a different thing to saying it needs another Hitler. I stand by that opinion - in fact I was ahead of my time in voicing it. There are in Britain right now parallels with the rise of the Nazi Party in pre-war Germany. A demoralised nation whose empire had disintegrated." Two years later, Margaret Thatcher was elected.
- Quoting David Bowie from 1977 ~ Mark Paytress

Looking back, I'm almost happy I lost that fight. Just imagine if I would have come back to Germany with a victory. I had nothing to do with the Nazis, but they would have given me a medal. After the war I might have been considered a war criminal. ~ Max Schmeling

The United States can't keep a completely open system if the rest of the world is less open. The United States may have to take a leaf out of the book of Japan, China, and Germany, and have protectionism inside the system. ~ Robert Mundell

Putin was a former KGB intelligence officer who'd been stationed in East Germany at the Dresden headquarters of the Soviet secret service. Putin has said in interviews that he dreamed as a child of becoming a spy for the communist party in foreign lands, and his time in Dresden exceeded his imagination. Not only was he living out his boyhood fantasy, he and his then-wife also enjoyed the perks of a borderline-European existence. Even in communist East Germany, the standard of living was far more comfortable than life in Russia, and the young Putins were climbing KGB social circles, making influential connections, networking a power base.

The present was bright, and the future looked downright luminous.

Then, the Berlin wall fell, and down with it crashed Putin's world. A few days after the fall, a group of East German protestors gathered at the door of the secret service headquarters building. Putin, fearing the headquarters would be overrun, dialed up a Red Army tank unit stationed nearby to ask for protection. A voice on the other end of the line told him the unit could not do anything without orders from Moscow. And, "Moscow is silent," the man told Putin.

Putin's boyhood dream was dissolving before his eyes, and his country was impotent or unwilling to stop it. Putin despised his government's weakness in the face of threat. It taught him a lesson that would inform his own rule: Power is easily lost when those in power allow it to be tak ~ Matt Szajer

Germans respond well to lies. At least, they always have historically. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

LATER. - I must go to Germany. At midnight Murrow phoned from London with the news. The British and French have decided they will not fight for Czechoslovakia and are asking Prague to surrender unconditionally to Hitler and turn over Sudetenland to Germany. I protested to Ed that the Czechs wouldn't accept it, that they'd fight alone ... . Maybe so. I hope you're right. But in the meantime Mr. Chamberlain is meeting Hitler at Godesberg on Wednesday and we want you to cover that. If there's a war, then you can go back to Prague. ~ William L. Shirer

The Security Council represents the situation from 1945 - you had the Allies who won the war who occupied that. The defeated guys - the Germans and Japan - were out. The occupied countries had no voice. That was fine in '45, but today, Germany rules Europe, frankly. They are driving Europe but have no voice. ~ Mo Ibrahim

The conflict has become like a Middle East version of the Thirty Years' War in Germany four hundred years ago. Too many players are fighting each other for different reasons for all of them to be satisfied by peace terms and to be willing to lay down their arms at the same time. Some still think they can win and others simply want to avoid a defeat. In Syria, as in Germany between 1618 and 1648, all sides exaggerate their own strength and imagine that temporary success on the battlefield will open the way to total victory. Many Syrians now see the outcome of their civil war resting largely with the US, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. In this, they are probably right. ~ Patrick Cockburn

I was living in Germany in the thirties, and I knew that Hitler had made it his mission to exterminate all Jews, especially the children and the women who could bear children in the future. I was unable to save my people, only their memory. ~ Roman Vishniac

News, like men, traveled slowly; intelligence of Barbarossa's death in Cilicia took four months to reach Germany.16 Medieval man could eat his breakfast without being disturbed by the industriously collected calamities of the world; or those that came to his ken were fortunately too old for remedy. ~ Will Durant

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Russia, Hermann Olberth in Germany, and Robert Goddard in the United States all came up with an eerily similar concept for using liquid fuel to power rockets for human spaceflight. I've seen this pointed out as an odd coincidence, one of those moments when an idea inexplicably emerges in multiple places at once. But when I read through each of these three men's biographies I discovered why they all had the same idea: all three of them were obsessed with Jules Verne's 1865 novel "De la terre a la lune (From the Earth to the Moon)." The novel details the strange adventures of three space explorers who travel to the moon together. What sets Verne's book apart from the other speculative fiction of the time was his careful attention to the physics involved in space travel -- his characters take pains to explain to each other exactly how and why each concept would work. All three real-life scientists -- the Russian, the German, and the American -- were following what they had learned from a French science fiction writer. ~ Margaret Lazarus Dean

If you give your all and it still doesn't work out in your favor, trust that God has something better. ~ Germany Kent

In his fitful eastward progress through Belgium and Germany that winter, my grandfather had shared all manner of billets: with dogfaces and officers, in misery and in comfort, in attack and in retreat, and pinned down by snow or German ordnance. He had bedded down under a bearskin in a schloss and in foxholes flecked pink with the tissue of previous occupants. If an hour's sleep were to be had, he seized it, in the bedrooms or basements of elegant townhouses, in ravaged hotels, on clean straw and straw that crawled with vermin, on featherbeds and canvas webbing slung across the bed of a half-truck, on mud, sandbags, and raw pine planks. However wretched, accommodations were always better or no worse than those on the enemy side. ~ Michael Chabon

It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been "spoiled" by the party system. Therefore they did not need to refute opposing arguments and consistently preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction. They presented disagreements as invariably originating in deep natural, social, or psychological sources beyond the control of the individual and therefore beyond the power of reason. This would have been a shortcoming only if they had sincerely entered into competition with other parties; it was not if they were sure of dealing with people who had reason to be equally hostile to all parties. ~ Hannah Arendt

In 1938, I. G. Farben sent a letter to (a major drug firm), one of its American subsidiaries, (that)..all advertising contracts must contain ' ... a legal clause whereby the contract is immediately cancelled if overnight the attitude of the paper toward Germany should be changed. ~ G. Edward Griffin

Partial legalization, as some are suggesting, is a dangerous path, and we need only look at France and Germany to see how unwise it is to create a permanent underclass. ~ Zoe Lofgren

To attribute foreseeable necessity to the catastrophe of Germany and the European Jews would be to give it a meaning that it didn't have. There is an unseemly optimism in such an assumption. In the history of mankind there is more that is spontaneous, wilful, unreasonable and senseless than our conceit allows. - GOLO MANN, GESCHICHTE UND GESCHICHTEN, P. 170 ~ Clive James

Jabotinsky insisted that all energies be expended to force the Congress to join the boycott movement. Nothing less than a 'merciless fight' would be acceptable, cried Jabotinsky. 'The present Congress is duty bound to put the Jewish problem in Germany before the entire world ... (We [Jews] must) destroy, destroy, destroy them, not only with the boycott, but politically, supporting all existing forces against them to isolate Germany from the civilized world ... our enemy [Germany] must be destroyed. ~ Ze'ev Jabotinsky

Intellectually speaking, people love you with the capacity that they have at that time. ~ Germany Kent

Despite this lamentable lack of balance in our education I do not believe that either children or adults in my country are permeated by a widespread hostility to Germany. ~ Douglas Hurd

Position yourself accordingly to maximize your impact. ~ Germany Kent

Hadn't we better turn it lower?" Tony whispered.
"Eh, what? It's quiet enough, I think."
Tony flung a hunted glance at the window. "You have let me listen in to Germany. If the police find out, there will be great trouble -"
"There won't be any trouble at all," said Thomas. "You're in England, remember. You're free to tune in to any station you please. ~ Constance Savery

If I go to Germany, I learn something in addition. The German television is very precise and respectable. One has never stress. In Italy it is more dynamic. But I amuse myself madly in both countries. ~ Michelle Hunziker

I'm not sure how it is in America, but for what I can say about Germany, most people give their information willingly to anyone who asks for it such as companies like Google. We just don't question it anymore. ~ Christian Schwochow

On Good Friday last year the SS found some pretext to punish 60 priests with an hour on "the tree." That is the mildest camp punishment. They tie a man's hands together behind his back, palms facing out and fingers pointing backward. Then they turn his hands inwards, tie a chain around his wrists and hoist him up by it. His own wight twists his joints and pulls them apart ... Several of the priest who were hung up last year never recovered and died. If you don't have a strong heart, you don't survive it. Many have a permanently crippled hand. ~ Jean Bernard

Germany has always stood for an E.U. of the 27 countries. But in light of Britain's continued resistance to further integration steps, as we saw with the fiscal pact, there are limits to my optimism in this regard. It's quite possible that we will have to create the new institutions for the euro zone first. ~ Wolfgang Schauble

Some fatherlands are difficult. Germany is one of them. But it is our fatherland. Here is where we live and work. ~ Gustav Heinemann

[Connor to Major Wentworth, grandson of King George]
My fathers were lairds in the Highlands when yours were still farmin' kale back in Germany! ~ Pamela Clare

The American people want peace. They have long since ceased to talk of a hard or a soft peace for Germany. ~ James F. Byrnes

I am a citizen of the Soviet Union and I think sharp measures need to be taken against anti-Soviet forces that are trying to make their way into the leadership. In addition, it is vitally important to maintain the lines of communication with Germany through Poland. ~ Konstantin Rokossovsky

Holland is precisely a country of lean, fatless two-meters-high vampires. The living ones in Holland are only the buzzed-up-coffee Indonesians, whom they inherited from the possession of Indonesia, islands of exotica and spices. In actual fact Holland is a railroad stage between France and Germany across Belgium, along the boring coast of a gray sea. In Holland 20 million of vampires live behind the protection of a concrete-laid coast ~ Eduard Limonov

My father left Nazi Germany a year after Dr. Kissinger, and so in my household he was very much an icon. He was a kind of immigrant success story, a refugee success story. ~ Eugene Jarecki

And in heaven's name, who are the public enemies?" exclaimed Dr. Leete. "Are they France, England Germany or hunger, cold and nakedness? ~ Edward Bellamy

After the First World War, Germany was trying to build a democracy. Then when the Reichstag, the legislature, was burned down in 1933, this was seen as such an emergency that human rights had to be suspended. The attack on the World Trade Towers has allowed Bush and his gang to do anything. What are we to do now? I say when there's a code red, we should all run around like chickens with our heads cut off. I don't feel that we are in any great danger. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Your last name may not be Kardashian but I can guarantee someone is keeping up with you. ~ Germany Kent

I find it strange that Gisela Gschaider a 1974 immigrant from Germany is on the brexit panel telling us British what we should do . ~ Alan Sugar

I love this country. I loved it the first time I came here, back in 1963. I love it because it's free. My mother escaped from Nazi Germany; the rest of her family never made it. The first thing Hitler did was take over the press and make it subservient to the government. Lenin did the same." Jasper had drunk a few glasses of wine, and as a result he was a shade more candid. "America is free because it has disrespectful newspapers and television shows to expose and shame presidents who fuck the Constitution up the ass." He raised his glass. "Here's to the free press. Here's to disrespect. And God bless America. ~ Ken Follett

The motorization of law into mere decree was not yet the culmination of simplifications and accelerations. New accelerations were produced by market regulations and state control of the economy - with their numerous and transferable authorizations and subauthorizations to various offices, associations and commissions concerned with economic decisions. Thus in Germany, the concept of "directive" appeared next to the concept of "decree." This was "the elastic form of legislation," surpassing the decree in terms of speed and simplicity. Whereas the decree was called a "motorized law," the directive became a "motorized decree." Here independent, purely positivist jurisprudence lost its freedom of maneuver. Law became a means of planning, an administrative act, a directive. ~ Carl Schmitt

The failure of the talks between Chamberlain and the German ambassador in London, the public and private outbursts of the Kaiser, the well-reported anti-British and pro-Boer sentiment among the German public, even the silly controversy over whether Chamberlain had insulted the Prussian army, all left their residue of mistrust and resentments in Britain as well as in Germany. ~ Margaret MacMillan

I have on the one hand a hatred and on the other a yearning for Vienna. I left when I was nine years old because I was Jewish. And even before 1938, the anti-Semitism in Austria was probably deeper than it was in Germany or in other European countries. ~ Eric Kandel

We had our family patterns and were quite comfortable in them, which made it even more shocking when, just after his eightieth birthday, Papa began bringing up his time as a prisoner of war in Germany.

Of course, I had always known that he had served in World War II and been captured, just like I had always know the stories about my grandmother and the build of their house. It's that peculiar type of family memory, where someone has obviously told you but you were too young to remember actually hearing it, so it seems like knowledge that was instilled at birth. Papa never brought it up, and my parents said they hadn't heard him mention it once in the previous fifty years. But suddenly, he was talking. ~ Jesse Cozean

Have an attitude of positive expectation. ~ Germany Kent

My kids miss me when I'm away, but I don't mind living out of a suitcase. The U.K., U.S., France, Germany, Iraq ... it's such a thrill meeting people of different cultures, learning about and from them. It's changed my perception about life, humanity and spirituality. ~ A.R. Rahman

Young professionals seeking cities to live and work in, and a wave of immigrants in inner-city neighborhoods and inner suburbs that eventually produced second-generation college graduates who moved into the center city to live and work. These groups joined the gays and artists who have always chosen to live in urban communities.12 Edward Glaeser points out that not all cities have succeeded in the past generation - and he points to Detroit, Michigan, and Leipzig, Germany, as examples. But most cities have found the power to reinvent themselves, argues Glaeser, because the essence of what makes a city a city is the bringing of people together to innovate. At one level, this means bringing together the most highly trained and talented people, the "elites." Yet at another level, it means bringing together the most energetic, ambitious, and risk-taking people from among the ~ Timothy Keller

I got body lice in Germany! I'd tell you they were crabs, but I wasn't getting laid. ~ Billie Joe Armstrong

I thought it was quintessentially American - very hip, very late-'60s. I was absolutely stunned when a German production company asked me if I could do a 'Sesame Street' in Germany. It was absolutely the happiest surprise. ~ Joan Ganz Cooney

I love Germany so much I'm glad there are two of them. ~ Francois Mauriac

You can always reason with a German. You can always reason with a barnyard animal, too, for all the good it does. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

There were several key American scientists that favorably reported on Nazi eugenics after visiting Hitler's Germany in order to provide it cover. ~ A.E. Samaan

After the turmoil of the Second World War, my family ended up in Russian-occupied East Germany. When I attended fourth grade, I had to learn Russian as my first foreign language in school. I found this quite difficult because of the Cyrillic alphabet, but as time went on, I seemed to do all right. ~ Dieter F. Uchtdorf

If you look back at the history of the twentieth century, Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia several times. ~ Noam Chomsky

May be you find out I could be useful getting people out of camps and prisons in Germany - just before they got shot. I should love to do it and I like to jump out of a plane even every day. ~ Christine Granville

Peace is the wish of the French of Italy Spain Germany and all the world, and Great Britain alone the cause of preventing its accomplishment, and this not for any point of honour or even interest, but merely lest there should be an example in the modern world of a great powerful Republic. ~ Charles James Fox

The one person who didn't seem enthusiastic about giving a speech in Berlin was Obama. When Favreau and I talked to him about it, he didn't offer much beyond suggesting we use Berlin's story to talk about what we were proposing in our own foreign policy. Chancellor Angela Merkel rejected a request from the campaign for the speech to take place at the Brandenburg Gate, where Reagan had called on Gorbachev to tear down the wall, saying that the venue should be reserved for an actual president. When he learned about this, Obama was embarrassed and annoyed. "I never said I wanted to give a speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate," he snapped. It spoke to a larger dynamic in the campaign: While Obama was often blamed for the cult of personality growing up around him - arty posters, celebrity anthems, and lavish settings for his events - he was rarely responsible for it, and worried that we were raising expectations too high in a world that has a way of resisting change.

"Before he left for Afghanistan, he read a draft of the speech and told us he was satisfied with it - "You could put this speech on the teleprompter and I'd be fine," he said - but I was hoping for more than that. I was hoping for edits that would elevate the speech and make it more than a summation of our worldview. The shift to a foreign audience hadn't been hard, as Obama's message about working across races "and religions, his preference for diplomacy over war, his embrace of the science of climate c ~ Ben Rhodes

How can the United States be competitive globally if higher education is unaffordable? Germany, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Scotland and Sweden have no tuition for college. Other countries have low tuition. We need the best educated workforce in the world. Instead of spending endless amounts on the military, we need to invest in our young people. ~ Bernie Sanders

The rise of statism in our time is the natural result of the longing of godless, unchurched people for some kind of protection. When we lose to God we turn to what looks like the next most powerful thing, which is the state. How bad a choice that is, let Germany and Russia in recent years testify. ~ Sam Shoemaker

Better a street-sweeper in Mexico than a filmmaker in Germany! ~ Rainer Werner Fassbinder

I do not suppose that at any moment of history has the agony of the world been so great or widespread. Tonight the sun goes down on more suffering than ever before in the world. ~ Winston S. Churchill

I was sad to leave Europe in 1890, after my student days in Germany ... But then, once back in New York, I experienced an intense longing for Europe, for its vital tradition of music, theatre, art, craftsmanship ... I felt bewildered and lonely. How was I to use myself? ~ Alfred Stieglitz

What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for. ~ Joseph Heller

In the past the French came to Germany less with the desire to understand it than with a zealous desire to interpret, to analyze it dispassionately something for which their training at the Ecole Normale Superieure or the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the French language superbly equipped them to do. ~ Walter Abish

Love in France is a comedy; in England a tragedy; in Italy an opera seria; and in Germany a melodrama. ~ Marguerite Gardiner, Countess Of Blessington

Thousands of Americans, Englishmen and Frenchmen have visited Germany during the months after the national revolution and were able to testify as eye-witnesses that there is no country in the world where law and order are better maintained than in present-day Germany. That there is no country in the world where person and property are held in better respect than in our own, but that there is perhaps also no country in the word where a more rigorous fight is put up against those who believe that they are free to let loose their lower instincts to the detriment of their fellow-beings. ~ Adolf Hitler

I've travelled around the world, I've lived in Germany, I've lived in the United States, I've visited many countries, I can question why such a good country, such huge potential, why we don't develop in the right way. ~ Vitali Klitschko

I signed their paper. It was a contract obligating me to spend six weeks doing farmwork in the north of Germany. If I didn't show up at the train station tomorrow, the paper said, I would be treated as a wanted criminal and hunted down without mercy. ~ Edith Hahn Beer

I am against the planned political assassinations by our intelligence and defense agents.The CIA-FBI-DIA and DISC (Defense Industry Security Command) were set up originally to protect citizens of the USA. They became their own judges and juries, private servants of corporations with investments at home and abroad. I am against the constant destruction of evidence in criminal matters and political assassinations. Prime witnesses are murdered before or after testifying. Diaries are forged and planted in obvious places. Doubles are created to confuse. The Police Departments manipulate facts in cooperation with conspirators. I am outraged that our judicial system since 1947 has been patterned after Nazi Germany. Patsies are dead or locked away. The assassins walk the streets or leave the country - "home free". I am against using the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, to cover up the assassination of President Kennedy. When the highest court is corrupt, there is no hope at local levels. ~ Mae Brussell

In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. [...] It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: each involves a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to excrement. Hegel was among the first to see in the geographical triad of Germany, France and England an expression of three different existential attitudes: reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English). In political terms, this triad can be read as German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism and English liberalism. [...] The point about toilets is that they enable us not only to discern this triad in the most intimate domain, but also to identify its underlying mechanism in the three different attitudes towards excremental excess: an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way. It is easy for an academic ~ Slavoj Zizek

The Holocaust would never have happened if black people lived in Germany in the 1930s and 40s ... well, it wouldn't have happened to Jews. ~ Sarah

I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier. It therefore seems to me that there is one and only one valid argument on which a case for giving up strategic bombing could be based, namely that it has already completed its task and that nothing now remains for the Armies to do except to occupy Germany against unorganized resistance. ~ Sir Arthur Harris, 1st Baronet