Germans Quotes

“I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships—gone. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to 'make a new start' or to be 'born again': Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a 'clean' sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov's microcosmic miniature story 'Signs and Symbols,' which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective. The album of the distraught family contains a faded study of Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good.”
― Bertolt Brecht

“The bittersweetness of uncertainty: To win or to lose.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam. Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name—the Haskalah—for itself. The term derives from the word for 'mind' or 'intellect,' and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over 'exile' or 'return.' It's everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the 'messianic' Lubavitcher rebbe.) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them how to think also.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“[Kurt Cobain] had a lot of German in him. Some Irish. But no Jew. I think that if he had had a little Jew he would have [expletive] stuck it out.”
― Courtney Love

“A dog is der Hund the dog; a women is die Frau the wom[an]; a horse is das Pferd, the horse; now you put that dog in the Genitive case, & is he the same dog he was before? No sir; he is das Hundes; put him in the Dative case & what is he? Why, he is dem Hund. Now you snatch him into the accusative case & how is it with him? Why he is den Hunden? ... Read moreBut suppose he happens to be twins & you have to pluralize him – what then? Why sir they’ll swap that twin dog around thro’ the four cases till he’ll think he’s an entire International Dog Show all in his own person. I don’t like dogs, but I wouldn’t treat a dog like that. I wouldn’t even treat a borrowed dog that way.”
― Mark Twain

“I was glad to be made aware
that “Veimke” (jeune fille au pair),
is subject to natural law,
and can be made fat,
by such things as poor diet,
and alcohol.”
― Roman Payne

“I only care for the subjective life; I am very German, you see: The woods interest me, and the world does not.”
― Ouida, Wanda, Countess von Szalras.

“What's it like?"
"Death? It's like being on holiday with a group of Germans.”
― Rob Grant and Doug Naylor

“Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin's enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and 'security' departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmulevski. There were reasonably strong indigenous Communist forces in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, but in Hungary and Poland the Communists were a small minority and knew it, were dependent on the Red Army and aware of the fact, and were disproportionately Jewish and widely detested for that reason. Many of the penal labor camps constructed by the Nazis were later used as holding pens for German deportees by the Communists, and some of those who ran these grim places were Jewish. Nobody from Israel or the diaspora who goes to the East of Europe on a family-history fishing-trip should be unaware of the chance that they will find out both much less and much more than the package-tour had promised them. It's easy to say, with Albert Camus, 'neither victims nor executioners.' But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Germans today keep their waste more thoroughly separated than their races.”
― Timur Vermes, Er ist wieder da

“A Britisher would say this is jolly exciting."
"What would a German say?" Jo asked.
"I don't know. There's very little excitement in being German.”
― James Hold, Out of Texas 14 : The Iron Claw of Destiny, Part 2

“What people still do not like to admit is that there were two crimes in the form of one. Just as the destruction of Jewry was the necessary condition for the rise and expansion of Nazism, so the ethnic cleansing of Germans was a precondition for the Stalinization of Poland. I first noticed this point when reading an essay by the late Ernest Gellner, who at the end of the war had warned Eastern Europeans that collective punishment of Germans would put them under Stalin's tutelage indefinitely. They would always feel the guilty need for an ally against potential German revenge.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Most German perpetrators were never punished or rewarded for their behavior, but they had learned something about themselves. They know what they did or didn't do in the most morally fraught moment of their lives. They have seen themselves in extreme circumstances and, in that, they have seen their own extremes.”
― Fern Schumer Chapman, Motherland: Beyond the Holocaust: A Mother-Daughter Journey to Reclaim the Past

“The German citizen is a soldier, and the policeman is his officer. The policeman directs him where in the street to walk, and how fast to walk. At the end of each bridge stands a policeman to tell the German how to cross it. Were there no policeman there, he would probably sit down and wait till the river had passed by. At the railway station the policeman locks him up in the waiting-room, where he can do no harm to himself. When the proper time arrives, he fetches him out and hands him over to the guard of the train, who is only a policeman in another uniform. The guard tells him where to sit in the train, and when to get out, and sees that he does get out. In Germany you take no responsibility upon yourself whatever. Everything is done for you, and done well.”
― Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men on the Bummel

“The present destruction of Europe would not be complete and thorough had the German people not accepted freely [the Nazi] plan, participated voluntarily in its execution and up to this point profited greatly therefrom”
― Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress

“Africans find it hard to forgive us slavery, don't they?" He took my hand and said, "I thought you would have known that. My dear, they can't forgive us, and even more terrible, they can't forgive themselves. They're like the young here in this tragic country [Germany]. They will never forgive their parents for what they did to the Jews, and they can't forgive the Jews for surviving and being a living testament to human bestiality.”
― Maya Angelou, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes

“The Germans, who wanted Hitler and Germany to be defeated immediately, were true patriots, not traitors! The faster a dictator is defeated, the fewer people die because no dictator cares about human life!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Englishmen and Germans are blood brothers, descended from the same stern Woden-worshiping ancestors, blessed with the same rugged virtues, and fired with the same noble ambitions. In a world of diverse and hostile races the joint mission of these virile men is one of union and cooperation with their fellow Teutons in defense of civilization against the onslaughts of all others. There is work to be done by the Teuton. As a unit he must in times to come crush successively the rising power of Slav and Mongolian, preserving for Europe and America the glorious culture that he has evolved.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“May Jupiter grant that the Germans may recognize their strength and strive to aim for the highest, and they will be no longer men, but rather resemble gods, for divine and god-like is their genius.”
― Giordano Bruno

“You've no idea,' Dolly answered irrelevantly, her eyes wide with wonder at her past self, 'how difficult it is not to marry Germans once you've begun.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, In the Mountains

“It is not known what the Germanic tribes thought of the Romans who edged up to the river Elbe around the time of the birth of Christ, but for their part the Romans viewed these frightening tribesmen with a mixture of awe and contempt. Julius Caesar had incorporated the river Rhine into the empire by 31 BC but had refused to allow expansion further east; not only did he believe that the dark forests were home to fearful beasts and magical creatures like unicorns, but he and other Romans considered the Germans to be too barbaric to be absorbed into the empire. General Velleius was typical when he dismissed them as ‘wild creatures’ incapable of learning arts or laws, or said that they resembled human beings only in that they could speak.”
― Alexandra Richie, Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin

“Die meisten nahmen an, dass alle Deutschen fleißig, zielstrebig und ordentlich seien. I’m from Germany und daher made in Germany resultierte zu einem Qualifikations- und Qualitätssiegel – auch für Menschen. Ich erntete herzliche Begrüßungen und einen ganzen Strauß voller Vorurteile, die mir im Großen und Ganzen aber immer zu Gute kamen. Und wenn man es dann noch schaffte, nicht allen negativen Vorurteilen zu entsprechen (humorlos, spießig, emotionslos), hatte man alle Vorteile auf seiner Seite. Man musste seine Karten nur gut auszuspielen wissen.”
― Ronja Maue, Koks im Zuckerstreuer und Kakerlaken in der Wand

“We fought the Nazis, too, we 'good' Germans; verges' uns nei. Forget us never...The first human beings to fight to the death, to kill and be killed by the Nazis were -
Germans.”
― Philip K. Dick, Lies, Inc.

“Listen, Junto,' he said. 'They can wave flags. They can tell me the Germans cut off baby's behinds and rape women and turn black men into slaves. They can tell me any damn thing. None of it means nothing.'

'Why?'

'Because, no matter how scared they are of Germans, they're still more scared of me. I'm black, see? And they hate Germans, but they hate me worse. If that wasn't so they wouldn't have a separate army for black men.”
― Ann Petry, The Street

“Then I don't see—'

'Of course you don't,' he interrupted. 'You never will because you ain't never known what its like to live somewhere where you ain't wanted and every white son-of-a-bitch that sees you goes out of his way to let you know you ain't wanted. Christ, there ain't even so much as a cheap stinking diner in this town that I don't think twice before I walk into it to buy a cup of lousy coffee, because any white bastard in there will let me know one way or another that niggers belong in Harlem. Don't talk to me about Germans. They're only doing the same thing in Europe that's been done in this country since the time it started.”
― Ann Petry, The Street

“Anyone who thinks of the Germans as a naturally bellicose people should recall that Prussia-Germany was the only one of the continental powers in the run-up to 1914 whose elite seriously feared that if they had their war, their people might refuse to fight it.”
― James Hawes, The Shortest History of Germany

“Our “romantic” is a man of great breadth and the greatest rogue of all our rogues, I assure you.... I can assure you from experience, indeed. Of course, that is, if he is intelligent. But what am I saying! The romantic is always intelligent, and I only meant to observe that although we have had foolish romantics they don’t count, and they were only so because in the flower of their youth they degenerated into Germans, and to preserve their precious jewel more comfortably, settled somewhere out there—by preference in Weimar or the Black Forest.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“The Germans and Carlyle have perverted both thought and phraseology when they made the Artist the term for expressing the highest order of moral and intellectual greatness. The older idea is the truer- that Art, in relation to Truth, is but a language. Philosophy is the proper name for that exercise of the intellect which enucleates the truth to be expressed. The Artist is not the Seer; not he who can detect truth, but he who can clothe a given truth in the most expressive and impressive symbols.”
― John Stuart Mill, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill