20 Quotes Tagged: german

The handful of Germans who had reached the trench had been sacrificed for the stupid sort of fun called. Strategy, probably. Stupid! . . . It was, of course, just like German spools to go mining by candle-light. Obsoletely Nibenlungen-like. Dwarfs probably!

"In Japanese and Italian, the response to ["How are you?"] is "I'm fine, and you?" In German it's answered with a sigh and a slight pause, followed by "Not so good.

Every truth that we may think complete will prove itself untruth at the moment of shipwreck.

"As early as 1930 Schoenberg wrote: "Radio is an enemy, a ruthless enemy marching irresistibly forward, and any resistance is hopeless"; it "force-feeds us music . . . regardless of whether we want to hear it, or whether we can grasp it," with the result that music becomes just noise, a noise among other noises. Radio was the tiny stream it all began with. Then came other technical means for reproducing, proliferating, amplifying sound, and the stream became an enormous river. If in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time, "regardless whether we want to hear it," it roars from loudspeakers, in cars, in restaurants, in elevators, in the streets, in waiting rooms, in gyms, in the earpieces of Walkmans, music rewritten, reorchestrated, abridged, and stretched out, fragments of rock, of jazz, of opera, a flood of everything jumbled together so that we don't know who composed it (music become noise is anonymous), so that we can't tell beginning from end (music become noise has no form): sewage-water music in which music is dying."

If they were going to be like that, then I just wished they hadn't actually been German. It was too easy. Too obvious. It was like coming across an Irishman who actually was stupid, a mother-in-law who actually was fat, or an American businessman who actually did have a middle initial and smoked a cigar. You feel as if you are unwillingly performing in a music-hall sketch and wishing you could rewrite the script. If Helmut and Kurt had been Brazilian or Chinese or Latvian or anything else at all, they could then have behaved in exactly the same way and it would have been surprising and intriguing and, more to the point from my perspective, much easier to write about. Writers should not be in the business of propping up stereotypes. I wondered what to do about it, decided that they could simply be Latvians if I wanted, and then at last drifted off peacefully to worrying about my boots.

Alles studiren und lesen soll künfftig meistentheils in teutschen büchern geschehen,
auch was man schreibt, teutsch antworten. Im reden und schreiben muß man sich zu
kurzen wohl geschlossenen periodis gewöhnen, die flickwörter meiden, denen worthen
liecht und krafft geben. Allezeit also reden, wie es gleich zu papier gebracht werden
könte. Die gebreuchlichsten formeln und redensarten sich wohl einbilden, damit sie
ungezwungen und von selbsten fließen.

This was but a prelude;
where books are burnt
human-beings will be burnt
in the end

In Germany to-day one hears a good deal concerning Socialism, but it is a Socialism that would only be despotism under another name. Individualism makes no appeal to the German voter. He is willing, nay, anxious to be controlled and regulated in all things.

'You get yourself born,' says the German Government to the German citizen, 'we do the rest. Indoors and out of doors, in sickness and in health, in pleasure and in work, we will tell you what to do, and we will see to it that you do it. Don't you worry yourself anything.'

And the German doesn't.

[published in 1900]

No one has ever properly understood me, I have never fully understood anyone; and no one understands anyone else

I don't understand German myself. I learned it at school, but forgot every word of it two years after I had left, and have felt much better ever since.

"A word spoken in Polish has quite a different effect than when spoken in that "foreign" tongue, German."

There have been two great narcotics in European civilisation: Christianity and alcohol.

No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.

Am I racially kin to this man? Baynes wondered. So closely so that for all intents and purposes it is the same? Then it is in me, too, the psychotic streak. A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power. How long have we known this? Faced this? And — how many of us do know it?

An end in terror is preferable to terror without end.