Volkswagen German Quotes

An American woman once confronted me with the reproach, "How can you still write some of your books in German, Adolf Hitler's language?" In response, I asked her if she had knives in her kitchen, and when she answered that she did, I acted dismayed and shocked, exclaiming, "How can you still use knives after so many killers have used them to stab and murder their victims? ~ Viktor E. Frankl

I'm 16 now, I was 15 when it happened ... and the encryption code wasn't in fact written by me, but written by the German member. There seems to be a bit of confusion about that part. ~ Jon Johansen

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

I believe only in French culture and consider everything in Europe that calls itself 'culture' a misunderstanding, not to speak of German culture. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Jews, homosexuals, and Gypsies, the yellow, pink and brown triangles, were the prisoners who suffered most frequently and most severely from the tortures and blows of the SS and the Capos. They were described as the scum of humanity, who had no right to live on German soil and should be exterminated… but the lowest of the low in this "scum" were we, the men with the pink triangle. ~ Heinz Heger

Liebgott stuck the Luger between the mayor's eyes and pulled the trigger. The Luger misfired. Right when it clicked, this German went off running down the road. Speirs said, 'Shoot him.' One of our men shot and missed. I shot about thirty feet over the mayor's head. Another man brought him down. I won't say who. --Don Bond ~ Marcus Brotherton

They read the names out from sixth place to first. We were standing backstage behind a huge curtain, and Rachael and Evgeni were right next to us. Swell. I thought maybe we stood a chance of coming in fourth. But they didn't call us. "This is crazy!" I whispered to Aneta. "We're top three?" Then they called a German couple. We were in the top two!
Rachael smiled at me. "Oh, Derek! Great job!" she said. What she really meant was, "We're going to take first place and you can have our sloppy seconds." Then we heard, "In second place, from England…" Rachael's face went white as a ghost. She and Evgeni were second! That left only one place for us…
"Derek Hough and Aneta Piotrovska are world champions!"
I started screaming, "What? What?" and jumping up and down. So much for my neck pain. This wasn't real; it couldn't be! I ran out from behind the curtain, pumping my fists in the air. I caught a glimpse of Rachael's face. She was beyond pissed.
"We did it! We did it!" I yelled. The rest happened in slow motion: I ran out and jumped off the stage and the floor. While I was midair, I remember thinking, " I'm wearing these Cuban heels. This isn't gonna be good." Then I hit the floor and my legs buckled. I fell into a roll, then stood straight up--as if I meant to do it all along. I limped over to Aneta to collect our trophy and we hugged. I didn't give a crap about anything else. Not my neck or my knees or Rachael fuming as they snapped pictures of all of us. It was ~ Derek Hough

They always ate and made tea on the alcohol lamp before going to bed. This was quite in the German tradition, Tilda said. Germans in their homes ate six meals a day: breakfast, second breakfast, dinner, afternoon coffee, supper and in the evening tea or beer with sandwiches and kuchen. Betsy, in the cherry-red bathrobe, and Tilda in a blue one, feasted merrily. ~ Maud Hart Lovelace

I hope that the German people will never again make the mistake of believing that because the American people are peace-loving, they will sit back hoping for peace if any nation uses force or the threat of force to acquire dominion over other peoples and other governments. ~ James F. Byrnes

There in the midst of German life is an alien and isolated race of men. Loud and self-conscious in their dress, hot-blooded and restless in their manner. An Asiatic horde on the sandy plains of Prussia. Forming among themselves a close corporation, rigorously shut off from the rest of the world. ~ Walther Rathenau

Sorrento, August. For two weeks now I haven't heard a German word or understood an Italian one. This way one can manage to live with people; everything goes like clockwork and no irksome misunderstanding can arise. ~ Karl Kraus

I had the girlish, round face that would have passed for a German World War II poster of an Aryan Hitler youth had I worn braided pigtails. ~ Maggie Young

From time to time the German U-boat commanders have tried their best to behave with humanity. We have seen them give good warning and also endeavour to help the crews to find their way to port. One German captain signalled to me personally the position of a British ship which he had just sunk, and urged that rescue should be sent. He signed his message "German Submarine". I was in some doubt at the time to what address I should direct a reply. However, he is now in our hands, and is treated with all consideration. Even ~ Winston S. Churchill

We need the security standards to apply to the internet. We need to be able to trust that when we send our emails through Verizon, that Verizon isn't sharing with the NSA, that Verizon isn't sharing them with the FBI or German intelligence or French intelligence or Russian intelligence or Chinese intelligence. ~ Edward Snowden

I've just been wandering the streets at night. If I came by a German soldier out alone, I would follow him, shove the pistol to the back of his head, and shoot. Once, I even did two at the same time, but they were really drunk."


Poul-Erik aka 'Willy'
The Informer by Steen Langstrup ~ Steen Langstrup

We the undersigned, intend to establish an instruction and training institution which differs from the common elementary schools principally in that it will embrace, outside of (in addition to) the general and elementary curriculum, all branches of the classical high school, which are necessary for a true Christian and scientific education, such as: Religion, the Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, French and English languages; History, Geography, Mathematics, Physics, natural history, Introduction to Philosophy, Music, and Drawing. ~ C.F.W. Walther

Christianity - and that is its greatest merit - has somewhat mitigated that brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the Cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. This talisman [the cross] is fragile, and the day will come when it will collapse miserably. Then ... a play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll. ~ Heinrich Heine

It was not so much rebellion that fueled the German youth movement (as it did in the American youth movement of the 1960s); rather, it was romanticism. ~ Andrew Root

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

Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Fitz must not know in advance, for he would try to stop her. He might simply lock her in her room. He could even get her committed to a lunatic asylum. A wealthy upper-class man could have a female relative put away without much difficulty. All Fitz would have to do was to find two doctors willing to agree with him that she must be mad to want to marry a German. ~ Ken Follett

If there is one thing we admire about National Socialism it's the fact that it has succeeded, for the first time in German politics, in the complete mobilisation of human stupidity."30 ~ Volker Ullrich

By the Revolution the Germans have made themselves pariahs among the nations, incapable of winning allies, helots in the service of foreigners and foreign capital, and deprived of all self-respect. In twenty years' time, the German people will curse the parties who now boast of having made the Revolution. ~ Erich Ludendorff

The great trains are going out all over Europe, one by one, but still, three times a week, the Orient Express thunders superbly over the 1,400 miles of glittering steel track between Istanbul and Paris.
Under the arc-lights, the long-chassied German locomotive panted quietly with the labored breath of a dragon dying of asthma. Each heavy breath seemed certain to be the last. Then came another. ~ Ian Fleming

All was there - the programme of German resurrection, the technique of party propaganda; the plan for combating Marxism; the concept of a National-Socialist State; the rightful position of Germany at the summit ofthe world. Here was the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message. ~ Winston S. Churchill

The casting of the brash United States Army Air Force officer Colonel Robert E. Hogan and the pompous German Luftwaffe officer Colonel Wilhelm Klink was inspired. For this series - a comedy with the serious backdrop of war - to succeed, the lead players had to be the perfect fit. The dynamic portrayal of this military odd couple had to be articulate, accurate, and precise. For the show to work, for the concept to be accepted, for one of the most outlandish premises in television history to be believed, the actors signed to play the two leading characters not only had to bring these extreme individuals to life with broad, fictional strokes, they had to make them real in the details. ~ Carol M. Ford

In 1996, the artist Gunter Demnig started laying stolpersteine, or "stumbling blocks" -- cobblestone-sized, brass memorials -- in front of houses where victims of the Nazis used to live. Now in over 800 German towns and villages, they make the number of victims palpable: In some streets there are stolpersteine in front of every other house, sometimes with a single name, sometimes with the names of an entire family. On these streets it would have been glaringly obvious that some neighbors were missing: the Jewish family, the girl with Down syndrome, the homosexual, the communist. ~ Jennifer Teege

In language gender is particularly confusing. Why, please, should a table be male in German, female in French, and castrated in English? ~ Marlene Dietrich

Nova Scotia is a box bass and a fiddle and German sourdough and scotch eggs. And the air, all heavy and bracing and wet. When you're driving, you wave to the old guy walking along the side of the road in the plaid flannel shirt and he waves back, because it's just what you do. This is an extraordinarily hospitable and musical place. You've got to haul wood in the winter and batten down hatches during hurricanes, and there are bagpipes and banjos and weathered old barns and whales offshore and abandoned fishing boats sleeping on the beach. ~ Kate Inglis

…Having been, not only mutilated in our country, wounded in our very flesh, but also divested of our most beautiful images, for you gave the world a hateful and ridiculous version of them. The most painful thing to bear is seeing a mockery made of what one loves. ~ Albert Camus

I've read all the books, I've watched all the films and now, thanks to the glory of home gaming, I've even kind of experienced it: I've landed on the beaches of Normandy, I have successfully held Pegasus Bridge and I've disabled German tanks with stolen Panzerfausts. I have fought in Italy, France and North Africa and if I had a Euro for every virtual life I've lost I'd be able to build a replica of Hitler's bunker in my back garden. ~ Tom Dunne