Helmut Schmidt Quotes

Immigration from foreign civilizations creates more problems than it can bring us in terms of positive factors on the labor market. Immigration from related civilizations, for example from Poland, is problem-free. From the Czech Republic, for example, is no problem. From Austria, for example, is no problem. From Italy is no problem. It starts with somewhat more eastern regions. Immigration from Anatolia, for example, is not entirely problem-free. Immigration from Afghanistan causes considerable problems. Immigration from Kazakhstan causes problems. These are other civilizations. Not because of their different genes, not because of their different ancestry, but because of the way they were brought up as infants, as toddlers, as schoolchildren, as children in the family.

DIE ZEIT, nr. 36/2007, 30. August 2007

What troubles me is that we will see in Germany no approximation of the East German income to the West German income anymore, because productivity stays so far behind.

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

The rule of law does not have to win, it does not have to lose, but it has to exist!

Science and future, that is a contradiction.

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.

Weggefährten - Erinnerungen und Reflexionen, Siedler-Verlag Berlin 1996, S. 54, ,

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.

DIE ZEIT, 19. Oktober 2003, zeit.de

If we continue on for decades as before, then I have to be pessimistic about our country.

The multicultural society is an illusion of intellectuals.

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, ,

Of course, nuclear power has its risks. But there is no power and nothing in the world without risks, not even love.