Helmut Schmidt Quotes

Do we want also to be world champion in moaning?

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

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.

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

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

The era of Schmidt and of his East German counterpart, Erich Honecker, Party Chief from 1971 and Chairman of the Council of State from 1976 to 1989, led to a sober, measured rapprochement and a resolution of relations between the two states. The West Germans sought to foster a German-German community of responsibility against the background of a reduction in international tension. Uneasiness in the early 1980s about the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in West Germany was a product of these attitudes. Nevertheless, as part of this community of responsibility, concern within West Germany about the plight of East Germans, let alone support for reunification, markedly declined, reflecting the extent to which the Germans had also been major players in creating the reality of two separate nations. There was no real West German support for the citizens’ rights movements in East Germany. Instead, stabilisation was more significant as a goal. The easing of relations thus entailed an acceptance of the governing system in Eastern Europe, for example of the suppression of the Czech Spring in 1968. East Germany, recognised for the first time as a state by much of the world in 1973, was admitted to the United Nations and other international bodies.

Weggefährten - Erinnerungen und Reflexionen, Siedler-Verlag Berlin 1996, S. 156, ,

Whoever has visions should go to the doctor.

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

The snail's pace is the normal pace of any democracy.

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

Handeln für Deutschland: Wege aus der Krise, Rowohlt, 1993, p. 136, ,

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.

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.

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