Max Nordau Quotes

#1. If I despised myself, it would be no compensation if everyone saluted me, and if I respect myself, it does not trouble me if others hold me lightly.

Max Nordau

#2. Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists

Max Nordau

#3. Let me tell you the following words as if I were showing you the rungs of a ladder leading upward and upward: Herzl; the Zionist Congress; the English Uganda proposition; the future world war; the peace conference where with the help of England a free and Jewish Palestine will be created.

Max Nordau

#4. The first condition a community should set, if it aspires to be a nation, is to own the land whereon it lives, and supply its own needs.

Max Nordau

#5. By the end of the 20th Century there will be a generation to whom it will not be injurious to read a dozen quire of newspapers daily, to be constantly called to the telephone ... and to live half their time in a railway carriage or in a flying machine.

Max Nordau

#6. Civilization is built on a number of ultimate principles ... respect for human life, the punishment of crimes against property and persons, the equality of all good citizens before the law ... or, in a word justice.

Max Nordau

#7. It is well to be alone. It fertilizes the creative impulse.

Max Nordau

#8. [H]istory is a melodrama on the theme of parasitism, characterized by scenes that are exciting or dull, as the case may be, and many a sudden stagetrick.

Max Nordau

#9. The artist writes, paints, sings or dances the burden of some idea or feeling off his mind.

Max Nordau