German Journalist Quotes

Heinrich Heine

Kurt Tucholsky

Friedrich List

Ulrike Meinhof

Sebastian Haffner

Hans Fritzsche

Markus Heitz

Man has—next to the drives of reproduction and dining—two passions: making noise and not listening.

The lotus flower is troubled At the sun's resplendent light; With sunken head and sadly She dreamily waits for the night.

I often said that never in the history of the world did one man receive so much faith and trust as Hitler. Similary, no one has ever betrayed so many people and abused so much good faith as he did.

One cannot overstate the childishness of the ideas that feed and stir the masses. Real ideas must as a rule be simplified to the level of a child's understanding if they are to arouse the masses to historic actions. A childish illusion, fixed in the minds of all children born in a certain decade and hammered home for four years, can easily reappear as a deadly serious political ideology twenty years later.

Sebastian Haffner

These are the strategic dialectics of anti-imperialist struggle: through the defensive reactions of the system, the escalation of counterrevolution, the transformation of the political martial law into military martial law, the enemy betrays himself, becomes visible.

An individual, in promoting his own interest, may injure the public interest; a nation, in promoting the general welfare, may check the interest of a part of its members.

Following the publication of my book on the Nobel Laureates in Economics (Horn, 2009), I was often asked, Of these ten outstanding economists, who was the one that impressed you most? Who left the greatest mark on you? Of course I had benefited greatly from all the conversations. All of them, without exception, were full of theoretical and human insights. Yet, the one that stands out in my mind was the conversation with James McGill Buchanan.

Appearances are there to be ignored, for the biggest hearts may reside in the smallest and unlikeliest of creatures. Those who fail to look beyond the surface will never encounter true virtue - not in others and certainly not in themselves.

Eichmann was in every respect a painstaking bureaucrat. He at once recorded in the files every discussion he ever had with any of his superiors. He always told me that the most important thing was to be covered at all times by one's superiors. He shunned all personal responsibility and took care to shelter behind his superiors - in this case Mueller and Kaltenbrunner - and inveigle them into accepting liability for his actions.

Dieter Wisliceny

All you have to do is anesthetize the masses by telling them they're an elite, that they've got a mission, that they're making history, that they're fulfilling their destiny and fighting for a better world — and they swallow it like lambs — even when a guttersnipe says it.

Hans Hellmut Kirst

The end justifies the means. Sometimes you have to do the wrong thing to get the right result.

Sebastian Fitzek

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other.

Oscar Ameringer

Archaeology, I found, comprehended all manner of excitement and achievement. Adventure is coupled with bookish toil. Romantic excursions go hand in hand with scholarly self-discipline and moderation. Explorations among the ruins of the remote past have carried curious men all over the face of the earth… Yet in truth, no science is more adventurous than archaeology, if adventure is thought of as a mixture of spirit and deed.

If nature and earth, those kindliest of mother-goddesses, were so aroused as to annihilate cities, men could only conclude that the fault was theirs.

Hermann Schreiber