German Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Our units were tired. There were many whining pessimists in the army. I threw these panicky people out of the army right away and set to work. I told our men we could not retreat beyond the Volga... I believe that nowhere else in this war was there such bloody hand-to-hand combat. Nowhere else were bayonets and hand grenades used so widely as in Stalingrad... Lieutenant General Rodimtzev's division was first to arrive there and received the fierce German blow. Rodimtzev told me: 'We will fight to the last man, but we shall not leave the city.'... Our soldiers had only one idea. Stalin had ordered us not to retreat.

They say of us that we are an anti-Christian movement. They even say that I am an outspoken paganist.... I solemnly declare here, before the German public, that I stand on the basis of Christianity, but I declare just as solemnly that I will put down every attempt to introduce confessional matters into our Hitler Youth.

Baldur von Schirach

Only a few years ago one could observe, at least among German psychologists, a quite pessimistic mood. After the initial successes of experimental psychology in its early stages, it seemed to become clearer and clearer that it would remain impossible for experimental method to press on beyond the psychology of perception and memory to such vital problems as those with which psychoanalysis was concerned. Weighty 'philosophical' and 'methodological' considerations seemed to make such an undertaking a priori impossible.

There is no punishment that would be hard enough to be applied to these Nazi beasts. Of course, in the case of this coming retribution, the innocent will have to suffer along with them. Ninety-nine percent of the German population have directly or indirectly the guilt for the present situation. Therefore we can only say, those who travel together hang together.

Friedrich Kellner

For my Oxford degree, I had to translate French and German philosophy (as it turned out, Descartes and Kant) at sight without a dictionary. That meant Germany for my first summer vacation, to learn the thorny language on my own.

King Christian X, king of Denmark, used to ride through the streets of Denmark on his horse and wave to the people of Denmark. A German soldier said to a boy; "Where is his body guard?", and the boy said "All of Denmark is his bodyguard". This is reportedly true.

For many years, and like many British people, I had little feeling for the most expressive and roughest form of early twentieth century European painting, the expressionism of German artists around the First World War like Kirchner.

Nicholas Serota

Immanuel Kant lived with knowledge as with his lawfully wedded wife, slept with it in the same intellectual bed for forty years and begot an entire German race of philosophical systems.

Here, in the last pages of the "Abegg" Variations, Schumann plays the motto theme A-B-E-G-G (B in German notation is the English Bb) not by sounding the last four notes but by taking them away, one by one, from, the chord of Bb-E-G. This is the first time in history that a melody is signified not by the attack but by the release of a series of notes. The motto, however, ends with a repeated final G. If the motto is played by releasing each successive note, we are faced with a paradox: when the G is released once on the piano, it is no longer there to be released again-the motto is not only unplayable as conceived but unimaginable. Schumann signifies as much by another paradox: he adds accents to the sustained notes.

The dog, who had sounded so ferocious in the winter distances, was a female German Shepherd. She was shivering. Her tail was between her legs. She had been borrowed that morning from a farmer. She had never been to war before. She had no idea what game was being played. Her name was Princess.

The German Reunification and unification of Europe are two sides of the same coin.

When the German propaganda tries to be winsome it is like a clown with homicidal mania — ludicrous and terrifying both at once.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

Please help me, in order to get us invited [to the United States]. Helma [his wife] will then come later and I will work there and soon pay back the people who lend me the money. But finally I must get out of this internment [because the English mistrusted Schwitters, being a German] and further away from Norway, I want to be with all of you. Please get it done quickly and write to me about the outcome. Maybe my art is in danger and I, of course, with it. At last I would like to work on my abstracts again and find appreciation for them. Who knows what will happen?

Kurt Schwitters

My hair was pulled. I was hit with belts. So was the kid next door, and so was the kid next door. It was just the way it was. Many of the children I've seen were broken by their parents, which was the German-Austrian mentality. Break the will. They didn't want to create an individual.... It was all about conforming. I was one who did not conform and whose will could not be broken. Therefore I became a rebel. Every time I got hit, and every time someone said, 'You can't do this,' I said, 'This is not going to be for much longer, because I'm going to move out of here... of course, I had no plan how.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

You have ransacked every corner of Lower Saxony; but forty thousand German boors never can conquer ten times the number of British freemen. You may ravage—you cannot conquer; it is impossible: you cannot conquer the Americans. You talk, my Lords, of your friends among them to annihilate the Congress, and of your powerful forces to disperse their army: I might as well talk of driving them before me with this crutch!... If you conquer them, what then? You cannot make them respect you; you cannot make them wear your cloth: you will plant an invincible hatred in their breasts against you. Coming from the stock they do, they can never respect you...

William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham

I have often heard the statement made by foreign singers, as a demonstrated fact, that the German artists are artists in feeling indeed, and serious in their devotion, but that their singing is crude.

It gives me great confidence and pride to think that, had the Israelites been influenced by German engineering, Paul and Timothy might have journeyed in an old Volkswagen camping van.

Unlike the cosy little A-roads in England, their French counterparts tended to be both straight and lined with trees, in order, it was said, that the German army might more easily find their way to Paris, and march in the shade while they did so.

Guy Fraser-Sampson

By placing these people with foreign ideas in camps, German blood was saved. Would it have been better to have a civil war?

Like a gigantic pump, the German Reich sucked in Europe's resources and working population.

Eugene M. Kulischer

The union of the States of Germany into a form of government similar in many respects to that of the American Union is an event that can not fail to touch deeply the sympathies of the people of the United States. This union has been brought about by the long-continued, persistent efforts of the people, with the deliberate approval of the governments and people of twenty-four of the German States, through their regularly constituted representatives.

Ulysses S. Grant

A year and a half after the end of the war and the German occupation, Paris was muted and looked bruised and forlorn. Everywhere I went, I sensed the tracks of the wolf that had tried to devour the city. But Paris proved inedible, as it had been ever since its tribal beginnings on an island in the Seine, the Ile de la Cité.

Nevertheless I like being in Norway [to escape the Nazi threat Schwitters fled to Norway, c. 1937], for it is a country of unparalleled beauty... I paint landscapes and portraits, model portrait, glue and paint abstract pictures and glue abstract plastic art; besides, I write poetry in German... What distresses me most of all is that I cannot live in my 'Merzraum' [a sculptured studio-space, Schwitters had built in Germany in the 1920's, but bomb-damaged in the war] and that it may be given up to destruction. For that reason I ask you once more, can you keep your ear to the ground again, to see if anyone in America is willing to give me an opportunity to shape a three-dimensional room?

Kurt Schwitters

Let me assure the Sultan and the three hundred million moslems... That the German Emperor will ever be their friend.

Moreover, there is this completely false trial. I would participate wholeheartedly in a trial if it were to determine the guilt for 5 million murdered people and the guilt for the atrocities. But I see in this trial endless other things brought out and I have the feeling that in the shadow of the guilt of these murders the German people shall be considered guilty of everything, and in the shadow of this guilt the Americans, English, French, and especially the Russians will want to get rid of their own dirty linen.