German Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

Karl Marx

Martin Bormann

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor

Roald Dahl

Jean-Marie Le Pen

Arthur Seyss-Inquart

Ernst Kaltenbrunner

A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police spies.

Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip and Germans, no less than other peoples, prepare for the last war.

Barbara W. Tuchman

The German landscape is something unique that we cannot disturb and have no right to destroy. The more densely populated our 'living space' becomes with settlements, the greater our hunger will grow for unspoilt nature. The ever increasing spiritual damage caused by life within the big city will make this hunger practically uncontrollable... when we build here on this the landscape of our homeland we must be clear that we will protect its beauty; and in places where this beauty has already disappeared, we will reconstruct it.

A university anywhere can aim no higher than to be as British as possible for the sake of the undergraduates, as German as possible for the sake of the public at large-and as confused as possible for the preservation of the whole uneasy balance.

We do not build speedways, but roads which correspond to the character of the German landscape.

I shot down some German planes and I got shot down myself, crashing in a burst of flames and crawling out, getting rescued by brave soldiers.

The Slavs are to work for us. Insofar as we do not need them, they may die. Therefore, compulsory vaccination and German health service are superfluous. The fertility of the Slavs is undesirable. They may use contraceptives or practice abortion, the more the better. Education is dangerous. It is enough if they can count up to one hundred. At best an education which produces useful coolies for us is admissible. Every educated person is a future enemy.

To God I speak Spanish, to women Italian, to men French, and to my horse—German.

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor

Everyone sees drama from his own perspective. My father was killed by a German mine, while I lost other relatives in Allied bombing attacks. The Second World War claimed tens of millions of victims. For some the most terrible aspect of it was the deportations, while for others it was the leveling bombings or the mass deaths by starvation and cold.

Jean-Marie Le Pen

The Jews are the enemy of National Socialism. From the time of their emancipation their methods were directed to the annihilation of the folkish and moral worth of the German people and to replace a national and responsible ideology with international nihilism. It was really they who stabbed the Army in the back which broke the resistance of the Germans in the First World War. The Jews are the enemy with whom no armistice or peace can be made. We will smite the Jews where we meet them and whoever goes along with them must take the consequences.

Arthur Seyss-Inquart

I have loved my German people and my fatherland with a warm heart. I have done my duty by the laws of my people and I am sorry this time my people were led by men who were not soldiers and that crimes were committed of which I had no knowledge. Germany, good luck.

Ernst Kaltenbrunner

At that moment of realization I knew that I had been blind because I had wished not to see; it was only then that I realised, at last, that all these dead men, French and Germans, were brothers, and I was the brother of them all.

The National Socialist Party in Austria never tried to hide its inclination for a greater Germany. That Austria would one day return to the Reich was a matter of course for all National Socialists and for true Germans in Austria.

Arthur Seyss-Inquart

On quantum theory I use up more brain grease (rough translation of German idiom) than on relativity.

Albert Einstein

All things considered, I could never have survived my youth without Wagnerian music. For I seemed condemned to the society of Germans. If a man wishes to rid himself of a feeling of unbearable oppression, he may have to take to hashish. Well, I had to take to Wagner...

Friedrich Nietzsche

In nearly all the matters in which the Pan-German movement was wanting, the attitude of the Christian Social Party was correct and well-planned.

I am stretching out this volume, since those German dogs estimate the value of books by their cubic contents.

It is eastwards, only and always eastwards, that the veins of our race must expand. It is the direction which Nature herself has decreed for the expansion of the German peoples.

The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.

I can understand German as well as the maniac that invented it, but I talk it best through an interpreter.

When in 1909 our battlefleet returned from its voyage around the world, Admirals Wainwright and Schroeder represented the best traditions and the most effective action in our navy; one was of old American blood and of English descent; the other was the son of German immigrants. But one was not a native-American and the other a German-American. Each was an American pure and simple. Each bore allegiance only to the flag of the United States. Each would have been incapable of considering the interests of Germany or of England or of any other country except the United States.

Theodore Roosevelt

Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate -healthy virile hate- for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German.

Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or in German.

G. K. Chesterton

Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, I would not have lifted a finger.

Albert Einstein

A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself.

Theodor W. Adorno