A fairly young, intelligent-looking man with long hair asked me whether filming or being filmed could do harm, whether it could destroy a person. In … - Werner Herzog

And yet, in my childhood, there was nothing to indicate anything exceptional except possibly in the negative. I was quiet, reserved, inclined to sudden outbursts of temper; in general, I was a danger to those around me. I was capable of silent brooding, for instance, because I wanted to understand why six times five came to the same thing as five times six. It even seemed to be a general principle, so eleven by fourteen was the same as fourteen by eleven. Why? There was a law hidden in the numbers that I could not wrap my head around until I pictured a rectangle with rows of six pieces by five spread out in front of me, and if you turned the shape by ninety degrees, then the principle became visible.

I have a deep aversion to too much introspection, to navel-gazing. I'd rather die than go to an analyst, because it's my view that something fundamentally wrong happens here. If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will become uninhabitable . . . I am convinced that it's psychoanalysis – along with quite a few other mistakes – that has made the twentieth century so terrible. As far as I'm concerned, the twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake.

I'm completely aware and utterly aware that Russia [the Soviet Union] lost 25 million people for winning the war, and I know that Russian troops were the ones who liberated concentration camps, Auschwitz and others, and I'm aware that there's an incredible sacrifice on the side of Russia, and I do believe that it's ignored because of course of political interests. It's very much the question what are the facts, maybe 600 or so thousand American soldiers lost their lives in the Second World War, 25–26 million Russian. Those are facts that cannot be ignored, and today it's not that really important what really happened, it's more the question who owns the narrative, and occupying the narrative has created some sort of lopsided ideologies in lopsided information, that we see every day.