Emil Ludwig Quotes

Since the banks and the big industrialists wished to rid themselves of the Socialists, with their wage demands and strikes, they contributed generously to this popular party. ...Hitler's speeches constantly promised the masses a renewal of the soldier-spirit, a new army and new victories.

The State has no higher purpose than the protection of its interests. These, however, for Great Powers, are not necessarily identical with the preservation of peace.

The responsibility of the Sovereign was supreme, and as a consequence the whole extent of the various failures, or even the final defeat, is primarily attributable to him.

And so the Emperor-King, in his oath, had sworn only to his own actual authority to decide all vital national questions “to the best of his ability”—and on what other principle does any reasonable human being proceed? None the less he remained, whatever the consequences, inviolable, unindictable, or, as it was expressed in other German National Constitutions, “hallowed.” At the beginning of the twentieth century, in the Old and the New Worlds, there was—besides the Tsar and the Sultan—no one who possessed such authority as William the Second.

The Balkan War of October 1912 convulsed the European Powers. They all lied freely, differing only in the manner of it—which in Petersburg was brazen, in London cautious, in Vienna frivolous, in Berlin stupid.

His effect, in complete contrast to Mussolini's... he juggles with mystical notions such as Honor, Blood, and Soil, and thus wraps his audience in that cloud of mysticism which the Germans love far more than mere prosaic logic.

His versatility turns out to be mere superficiality; his private life is narrowly watched, and the general conclusion is that he spends most of his time in amusing himself.