Helmut Schmidt Quotes

If you look closely, you'll see that the political journalists actually more belong to the political class and less to journalism.

In the basic questions, one have to be naive. And I think that the problems of the world and of humanity cannot be solved without idealism. However, I also believe that one should be realistic and pragmatic at the same time.

I think that the idea that a modern society would be able to establish itself as a multicultural society, with as many cultural groups as possible is absurd. One cannot make out of Germany with at least a thousand years of history since Otto I subsequently make a crucible.

Frankfurter Rundschau, 12. September 1992, S. 8, zitiert in konservativ.de und linksnet.de

The more direct decisions by all the people, all the more ungovernable is the country!

With a democratic society, the concept of multiculturalism is difficult to reconcile. Maybe in a very long term. But if you ask, where multicultural societies have so far worked, you can get very quickly to the conclusion that they only work there peacefully where there is a strong authoritarian state there. So, it was a mistake that we picked up at the beginning of the 60's guest workers from foreign cultures into the country. There is still no multicultural society [in the USA] either, but perhaps one day there will be. Singapore is a good example, but the cultures living there all speak English and the political system is based on authority.

It is an irony of history that the public sector union, my union, in which I am a member for over 50 years, that imagines that the public service should be the pacemaker in the wage increase. One must be crazy.

Today, the most important is to learn to understand other people. And not only their music, but also their philosophy, their attitude, their behavior. Only then will nations can get along with each other.

One is left, the other is right. But comparable populists are Lafontaine and Le Pen already.

Whoever has visions should go to the doctor.

Did it have to come to this? The paradox is that when Europe was less united, it was in many ways more independent. The leaders who ruled in the early stages of integration had all been formed in a world before the global hegemony of the United States, when the major European states were themselves imperial powers, whose foreign policies were self-determined. These were people who had lived through the disasters of the Second World War, but were not crushed by them. This was true not just of a figure like De Gaulle, but of Adenauer and Mollet, of Eden and Heath, all of whom were quite prepared to ignore or defy America if their ambitions demanded it. Monnet, who did not accept their national assumptions, and never clashed with the US, still shared their sense of a future in which Europeans could settle their own affairs, in another fashion. Down into the 1970s, something of this spirit lived on even in Giscard and Schmidt, as Carter discovered. But with the neo-liberal turn of the 1980s, and the arrival in power in the 1990s of a postwar generation, it faded. The new economic doctrines cast doubt on the state as a political agent, and the new leaders had never known anything except the Pax Americana. The traditional springs of autonomy were gone.

Weggefährten - Erinnerungen und Reflexionen, Siedler-Verlag Berlin 1996, p. 58, ,

im Gespräch mit Hans Küng über den Weltethos, 2007, YouTube

Science and future, that is a contradiction.

It is true that the politician at the moment of his actions or if he explains his actions and justifies them cannot provide at the same time also great philosophy. But if he acts without philosophical and ethical foundations, he is in danger of making mistakes. He is in danger to sink into opportunism. He is even in danger of being a charlatan.