West Germany Quotes

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

You find nothing like that among humans. Yes, human groups may have distinct social systems, but these are not genetically determined, and they seldom endure for more than a few centuries. Think of twentieth-century Germans, for example. In less than a hundred years the Germans organised themselves into six very different systems: the Hohenzollern Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the German Democratic Republic (aka communist East Germany), the Federal Republic of Germany (aka West Germany), and finally democratic reunited Germany. Of course the Germans kept their language and their love of beer and bratwurst. But is there some unique German essence that distinguishes them from all other nations, and that has remained unchanged from Wilhelm II to Angela Merkel? And if you do come up with something, was it also there 1,000 years ago, or 5,000 years ago?
The (unratified) Preamble of the European Constitution begins by stating that it draws inspiration 'from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, from which "have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, democracy, equality, freedom and the rule of law'.3 This may easily give one the impression that European civilisation is defined by the values of human rights, democracy, equality and freedom. Countless speeches and documents draw a direct line from ancient Athenian democracy to the present-day EU, celebrating 2,500 years of European freedo ~ Yuval Noah Harari

When I was 11 years old, my family had to leave East Germany and begin a new life in West Germany overnight. Until my father could get back into his original profession as a government employee, my parents operated a small laundry business in our little town. I became the laundry delivery boy. ~ Dieter F. Uchtdorf

American critics of welfare statism are often surprised to learn that countries like West Germany, with a much more comprehensive welfare state and a statistically larger public sector, have fewer government employees per capita than the United States does. ~ Robert Kuttner

I believe that the Europeans, first and foremost, the Germans, will also understand me. Let me remind you that in the course of political consultations on the unification of East and West Germany ... some nations that were then and are now Germany's allies did not support the idea of unification. Our nation, however, unequivocally supported the sincere, unstoppable desire of the Germans for national unity. I am confident that you have not forgotten this, and I expect that the citizens of Germany will also support the aspiration of the Russians, of historical Russia, to restore unity. ~ Vladimir Putin

I defy my honored opponents to give me the name of a single man imprisoned in the United States, Great Britain, or West Germany for being an atheist. But in former communist countries, millions of our Christian brothers and sisters in faith have passed through jails or been killed. Who has fought for freedom and obtained it - atheists or Christians? ~ Richard Wurmbrand

If the purpose of the wall was to destroy Berlin, Herr Ulbricht and his cohorts have erred sadly. Berlin is not only going to continue to exist - it's going to grow and grow and grow. Its ties to West Germany will not be severed. ~ Robert Kennedy

I was an Army intelligence agent and a veteran during the Cold War, assigned to West Germany. I was the chairman of the National Commission on Homeland Security and Terrorism for the United States for five years. I was a person who has dealt extensively with these homeland security issues. I was a governor during the 9/11 attack. ~ Jim Gilmore

Even in West Germany in the beginning, people wanted a kind of socialism. ~ Stefan Heym

I grew up spending time at my grandmother's farm in Germany and she lived a few kilometers away from the border between east and west Germany. It was so strange that roads which used to connect two towns now ended in the middle. ~ Matthea Harvey

I am not saying that during the Second World War Germany did not, under the leadership of the National Socialist government, commit crimes. ~ Ernst Zundel

I grew up in Germany for a little while, and all my German friends said that Seattle, weather and energy-wise, is a lot like West Germany. It's true. ~ Daniel Breaker

You know, North Korea situation is far worse than East Germany, and South Korea is weaker than West Germany. ~ Kim Dae-jung

The biggest trading partner of the United States is not West Germany or Japan, it's right here. ~ Brian Mulroney

If we had had time and the occasion to develop a new socialism in the GDR, socialism with a human face, with democracy, this might have been an example also to West Germany. The development would have run the other way. ~ Stefan Heym

West Germany's Briegel hasn't been able to get past anyone yet - that's his trademark. ~ John Helm

IN 1959, Oppenheimer attended a conference in Rheinfelden, West Germany, sponsored by the Congress on Cultural Freedom. He and twenty other world-renowned intellectuals gathered in the luxurious Saliner Hotel on the banks of the Rhine near Basel to discuss the fate of the Western industrialized world. Safe in this cloistered environment, Oppenheimer broke his silence on nuclear weapons and spoke with uncharacteristic clarity about how they were seen and valued in American society. "What are we to make of a civilization which has always regarded ethics as an essential part of human life," he asked, but "which has not been able to talk about the prospect of killing almost everybody except in prudential and game-theoretical terms? ~ Kai Bird

Honscheid came over from West Germany for the first Hawaiian World Cup and discovered jumping, which was new to him, although Mike Horgan and I were jumping in 1974 and 1975. There ~ Eric Von Hippel

Played out over time, the differences in growth and middle-class prosperity between countries that have decreased incentives (through increased income redistribution) and those that have not are startling. Look at the differences between Europe and the U.S.; East and West Germany; and Communist China versus Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China today. There are enormous and compounding costs to dulling incentives for entrepreneurial risk-taking with few, if any, exceptions. ~ Edward Conard

And of course, in West Germany, they made every effort that people who came from the East would get jobs and would get a comfortable existence. That was part of the Cold War - and part of the winning side of the Cold War. ~ Stefan Heym

2.2 billion worth of military equipment had been stripped from U.S. Forces in West Germany and America and shipped to Israel in an unprecedented day and night airlift. ~ George Scratchley Brown

More riveting to me in the end than the politics of Berlin was the vast social experiment its division had become... it was possible to have freedom and plenty in the West and craft an empty life; it was possible to "have nothing" in the East and create a life of intimacy and dignity and beauty. ~ Krista Tippett

It is always the case that when something emerges - which, of course, from the perspective of the former West Germany looks very different - then people say, 'She hasn't told us this yet' and 'She hasn't told us that yet.' I don't know - maybe there are other things I didn't talk about because no one ever asked me. ~ Angela Merkel

The United States dollar took another pounding on German, French and British exchanges this morning, hitting the lowest point ever known in West Germany. ~ Gordon Sinclair

Once their gaze turned back toward Europe, the puzzle dissolved: West Germany was the obvious equivalent and, indeed, a splendid candidate for the role of the global plan's European shock-absorbing pillar - certainly not Britain. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

One of its most distinctive features was the ninety-six meters high and twelve thousand tons heavy sandstone dome that stood the test of time and wars until it came down during the bombing of Saxony by Anglo-American allied forces during the Second World War. Only the altar, a relief description of Jesus' agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, and the chancel behind it survived. The church then lay dormant for more than forty-five years before it was restored to its former glory as Communist rule enveloped Germany. One of the reasons for the delay was the tensions that ensued before the demolition of the Berlin Wall that divided East and West Germany. ~ K.T. Tomb

When I turned 11, we had to leave East Germany overnight because of the political orientation of my father. Now I was going to school in West Germany, which was American-occupied at that time. There in school, all children were required to learn English and not Russian. To learn Russian had been difficult, but English was impossible for me. ~ Dieter F. Uchtdorf

There are also people who lived in either side of Germany, but who never had or have any relationship with the other side whether it was former East or former West Germany. ~ Christian Schwochow

A foreman in the East wouldn't know how many workers he would have the next day, because part of his working force had left the system to go to West Germany. ~ Stefan Heym

When I first began visiting West Germany in the early 1980s, I was startled by the contrast between Birmingham, where I went to school, and affluent Cologne. My host family, the lovely Schumachers, always had an opulent array of grapes on the table; they were better dressed than anyone I knew in Britain. ~ Luke Harding

Reason's a thing we dimly see in sleep. ~ Rebecca West

They would become the migrant labourers who made the "economic miracles" in Spain, France, Germany, Switzerland, ~ Helen Graham

I cannot abide the Mr. and Mrs. Noah attitude towards marriage; the animals went in two by two, forever stuck together with glue. ~ Vita Sackville-West

The town was more than ready to accept the window dressing that hid the ugly truth of Joe's guilt. Some shared the secrets and kept the silence. Others would not have believed if they had been told. They would not have wanted to know. As those who saw and ignored the smoke from the crematoria of Hitler's Germany, they did not want to know that their world was not as it seemed. ~ Judith Spencer

As with much of the world's problems, they become public
or much more of interest
the moment they begin to impact the West. ~ Chris Abani

on the continent


I'm soft. I
dream too.
I let myself dream. I dream of
being famous. I dream of
walking the streets of London and
Paris. I dream of
sitting in cafes
drinking fine wines and
taking a taxi back to a good
hotel.
I dream of
meeting beautiful ladies in the hall
and
turning them away because
I have a sonnet in mind
that I want to write
before sunrise. at sunrise
I will be asleep and there will be a
strange cat curled up on the
windowsill.

I think we all feel like this
now and then.
I'd even like to visit
Andernach, Germany, the place where
I began, then I'd like to
fly on to Moscow to check out
their mass transit system so
I'd have something faintly lewd to
whisper into the ear of the mayor of
Los Angeles upon to my return to this
fucking place.

it could happen.
I'm ready.
I've watched snails crawl over
ten foot walls
and vanish.

you mustn't confuse this with
ambition.
I would be able to laugh at my
good turn of the cards -

and I won't forget you.
I'll send postcards and
snapshots, and the
finished sonnet. ~ Charles Bukowski

The events of the last forty years have inflicted such a blow to the self confidence of Western civilization and to the belief in progress which was so strong during the nineteenth century, that men tend to go too far in the opposite direction: in fact the modern world is experiencing the same kind of danger which was so fatal to the ancient world--the crisis of which Gilbert Murray writes in his Four Stages of Greek Religion as "The Loss of Nerve."
There have been signs of this in Western literature for a long time past, and it has already had a serious effect on Western culture an education. This is the typical tragedy of the intelligentsia as shown in nineteenth century Russia and often in twentieth century Germany: the case of a society or class devoting enormous efforts to higher education and to the formation of an intellectual elite and then finding that the final result of the system is to breed a spirit of pessimism and nihilism and revolt. There was something seriously wrong about an educational system which cancelled itself out in this way, which picked out the ablest minds in a society and subjected them to an intensive process of competitive development which ended in a revolutionary or cynical reaction against the society that produced it. But behind these defects of an over-cerebralized and over-competitive method of education, there is the deeper cause in the loss of the common spiritual background which unifies education with social life. For the liberal ~ Christopher Henry Dawson

Not making the baseball team at West Point was one of the greatest disappointments of my life, maybe my greatest. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

Both Plockton and the Isle of Muck in north-west Scotland are incredibly beautiful. Sadly, Plockton has been discovered by tourists because it's where they shot Hamish Macbeth. ~ Arabella Weir

A soft moan escapes me, making him smile even more. He's too good at this. ~ Collette West

Of course we've been fighting against stereotypes from Day One at East West. That's the reason we formed: to combat that, and to show we are capable of more than just fulfilling the stereotypes - waiter, laundryman, gardener, martial artist, villain. ~ Mako

This vocation of yours.
She knew that a hunger dwelled in her, in that place where happier emotions should reside, a hunger she could neither sate nor deny. While her compulsion to scratch that itch never faded, she knew that she performed a service to the world in these coll west London rooms. While it was work for which she would receive not a single word of thanks, its value, Etienne believed, could not be denied. ~ Stephen Lloyd Jones

When I came to Chelsea from West Ham there were certain parts of my game I felt I needed to improve and I like to think now that I have shown dramatic improvement. ~ Frank Lampard

One of the things that is nice about these old pastors - they were young at the time - who went into the Middle West is that they were real humanists. They were often linguists, for example, and the schools that they established were then, as they are now, real liberal arts colleges where people studied the humanities in a very broad sense. I think that should be reflected in his mind; appropriately, it is. ~ Marilynne Robinson

If the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries were, in many countries of the West, times of accelerating social power, and a corollary increase in freedom, peace, and material welfare, the twentieth century has been primarily an age in which State power has been catching up - with a consequent reversion to slavery, war, and destruction.43 In ~ Murray N. Rothbard

hundred miles west and one would be out of the "Bible Belt," that gospel-haunted strip of American territory in which a man must, if only for business reasons, take his religion with the straightest of faces, but in Finney County one is still within the Bible Belt borders, and therefore a person's church affiliation is the most important factor influencing his class status. ~ Truman Capote

If a drug dealer falls in West Baltimore and no one is there to hear him, does he make a sound? ~ David Simon

When the Soviet Union fell, optimistic scholars believed the world had shifted inexorably in the direction of free markets and liberal democracy. Instead, the West gradually embraced bigger government and weaker social bonds, creating a fragmented society in which the only thing we all belong to, as President Barack Obama puts it, is the state. ~ Ben Shapiro

Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself. ~ Rebecca West

Come up and see me sometime. ~ Mae West

Thank you," I said, holding my hands behind my head, hoping my hair hid the fact that my wrists were bound together with seat belt straps. ~ Priscilla West

Germany can generally only pay if the Corridor and Upper Silesia will be handed back to Germany from Polish possession, and if besides somewhere on the earth colonial territory will be made available to Germany. ~ Hjalmar Schacht

Life's too short when you find yourself sitting in a car for four hours every day trying to get from East L.A. to West L.A. to Hollywood and then back to East L.A. ~ Garrett Hedlund

If you think about it, Jesus was this religious genius who grows up on the Silk Road, and so He's getting from the West all these Greek ideas from Plato about body and soul. ~ Jay Parini

Music is part of human life and partakes of the human tragedy. There is much more music in the world than is allowed to change into heard sounds and prove its point. ~ Rebecca West

She went to the window and looked out. The ground fell away to a branch where willows burned lime green in the sunset. Dark little birds kept crossing the fields to the west like heralds of some coming dread. Below the branch stood the frame of an outhouse from which the planks had been stripped for firewood and there hung from the ceiling a hornetnest like a gross paper egg. The tinker returned from the cart with a lantern ~ Cormac McCarthy

He had been taught that bread unshared is bread unblessed when someone else is hungry, whether man or beast, friend or stranger. ~ Dorothy West

The Soviet Union and the Communist countries know how to conduct negotiations. For a long time they make no concessions and then they give in just a little bit. Right away there is rejoicing: "Look, they've made a concession; it's time to sign." ....They give one thousandth of what natural law should provide--things which people should be able to do even before such negotiations are undertaken--and already there is joy. And here in the West we hear many voices that say: "Look, they're making concessions; it's time to sign. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I have nothing against the veil. And I think that, wrongly, many in the West look at the veil as a symbol of oppression. Now, as long as a woman chooses to wear the veil, because that's her belief and because of her own - that's a personal relationship with God, so she should be free to dress in whichever way she wants. ~ Queen Rania Of Jordan

The euro is a vital issue for Germany. There is no other country that derives as much benefit from the common domestic market and the monetary union as Germany. ~ Peer Steinbruck

I think as far as the music industry is concerned, it's kind of been the wild, wild West in a way with the Internet, which is not necessarily a bad thing to me. ~ Queen Latifah

Any well-established village in New England or the northern Middle West could afford a town drunkard, a town atheist, and a few Democrats. ~ D. W Brogan

My sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love, And though the sager sort our deeds reprove, Let us not weigh them. Heaven's great lamps do dive Into their west, and straight again revive, But soon as once set is our little light, Then must we sleep one ever-during night. See Catullus 200:5. ~ Thomas Campion

Dancing wasn't quite the same as running ... or any sport, for that matter. I didn't feel like I had a purpose, a goal. But after a while I let my mind relax and realized not everything had to have a point. Some things could just be for the fun of it. I looked over at Amber dancing next to me. She smiled, then hooked her arm in mine and twirled me around. My surroundings blurred and I soaked the moment in, deciding this night was something I could do again. ~ Kasie West

Debates about the imagination and its role in human knowledge go back in the West to ancient Greece around the secrets and enigmas of the revealed "symbol" and its relationship to the more plodding ways of reason and rational knowledge. The most recent chapter of that larger conversation goes back to the eighteenth century and what we now call the Romantic movement. The poets and philosophers of the latter asked: What is the imagination? Is it simply a spinner of fantasies? Or can it also become a "window" of revealed truths from some other deeper part of the soul or world? Or, better yet, like some secret two-way mirror in a modern-day police station, is the imagination both, depending on whether one is looking at or through its reflecting surface, that is, depending on which side of it one is standing? Can one stand on both sides? ~ Whitley Strieber

Psychoanalysis and Greek mythology are two sides of the same medallion. To put it differently: without classical mythology, there would be no psychoanalysis. If that seems like too bold a statement, this chapter aims to show that it is not. It will look at the dynamic relationship forged between psychoanalysis and classical myth, and the impacts, positive and negative, that each has made upon the other.
There are numerous psychoanalytic theorists, but Freud necessarily takes centre stage. Like many in 19th-century Germany, Freud was passionate about ancient
Greece and its myths. He was both an analyst of the psyche, or mind (using Greek myth) and of Greek myth (using the psyche). As a result, he initiated a radical new method of enquiry, psychoanalysis, and wrote a momentous chapter in the history of classical mythology. ~ Helen Morales

Mankind can still continue to live without the Englishman, can continue without Germany, can continue all too well without the Russian, can continue without science, can continue without bread - it is only without beauty that we cannot continue, for there will be nothing at all to do in the world! That's where the whole secret lies, that's where the whole of history lies! Science itself would not last a minute without beauty - ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I don't know how to get over it." "You can only go through it. ~ Kasie West

I also work with the regular orchestras in Munich, Germany and other similar orchestras. ~ Skitch Henderson

Most of the great universities of the West were founded with the conviction that theology is the queen of the disciplines. (...) Now, in the latter part of the twentieth century, that tradition has almost disappeared. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

If you had walked through the pleasant Tuscan countryside in the 1890's, you might have come upon a somewhat long-haired teenage high school dropout on the road to Pavia. His teachers in Germany had told him that he would never amount to anything, that his questions destroyed classroom discipline, that he would be better off out of school. So he left and wandered, delighting in the freedom of Northern Italy, where he could ruminate on matters remote from the subjects he had been force-fed in his highly disciplined Prussian schoolroom. His name was Albert Einstein, and his ruminations changed the world. ~ Carl Sagan

Why did Erich von Stronheim leave Germany? Why did Hitchcock leave England? If you were a director you'd like to work in Hollywood too. Now go ahead and ask me if I'm still Polish. You people keep asking me this question. You want Polish artists to make it in the world, but when they do, you accuse them of treason. ~ Roman Polanski

There had been no moments when she could differentiate and say: Then, at such a moment, I love him; and again, Then, at such another, I loved him not. The stress had been constant. her love for him had been a straight black line drawn right through her life. It had hurt her, it had damaged her, it had diminished her, but she had been unable to curve away from it. ~ Vita Sackville-West

Look at you, locked and loaded, like Mae West of the Motor City. ~ Ruta Sepetys

The aims of these shadowy 'circles' were all encompassing, 'total' in Hitler's words. 'Nothing less', in fact, 'than the elimination [Beseitigung] of those regimes', Germany and Italy most notably, 'which in their essence constitute a threat to the feudal-reactionary plutocracies.' Faced with this threat of annihilation, Hitler's time-horizon had shortened. ~ Anonymous

I am very proud to be taking command of a Type 23 frigate, which is an extremely flexible warship, and I'm looking forward to taking HMS Portland on operations with a professional and focused team. ~ Sarah West

When people say, 'If I had my life over again I wouldn't do anything different,' well, I'd do everything differently just for the variety. ~ Samuel West