Gdr's Quotes

#1. By the time of the GDR's demise, two in every 13 citizens were informers.

Luke Harding

#2. Betrayal clearly has its own reward: the small deep human satisfaction of having one up on someone else. It is the psychology of the mistress, and this regime used it as fuel.

Anna Funder

#3. Julia and her family, like many others in the GDR, trod this line between seeing things for what they were in the GDR, and ignoring those realities in order to stay sane.

Anna Funder

#4. We return to the places we're from; we trample faded corners and pencil in new lines.

Anthony Doerr

#5. Extreme inequality and financial crisis usually coincide. But the elite who cause it usually come out OK. And they are usually man.

Katrine Marcal

#6. A Western writer came up to me and said, how come nobody at this demonstration spoke of German unity? I told him, because it isn't on the agenda. People were interested in having another, better GDR, another, better socialism.

Stefan Heym

#7. I wanted to understand pain and the human condition, which is full of pain and regret and sadness - and some happiness, if you're lucky.

Kim Cattrall

#8. Maturity refers to having a sound understanding of basics and making a fair judgment.

Pearl Zhu

#9. But there was also a car - for the GDR an expensive car, a Russian Lada - that

Anna Funder

#10. You see the mistakes of one system - the surveillance - and the mistakes of the other - the inequality - but there's nothing you could have done in the one and nothing you can do now about the other. She laughs wryly. And the clearer you see that, the worse you feel.

Anna Funder

#11. The only place I really get recognized is at Ralphs. Whenever I'm in L.A., I go to Ralphs, and for some reason, everyone there recognizes me.

Lauren Lee Smith

#12. There are no people who are whole" he says. "Everyone has issues of their own to deal with. Mine might be a little harder, but the main thing is how on deals with them.

Anna Funder

#13. I like trains. I like their rhythm, and I like the freedom of being suspended between two places, all anxieties of purpose taken care of: for this moment I know where I am going.

Anna Funder

#14. Miriam is upset. Her voice is stretched and I can't look at her. Perhaps they beat something out of her she didn't get back.

Anna Funder

#15. If they're going to get policewomen to jump me ... I wish they'd get sexier ones..

Yukiru Sugisaki

#16. It was a condition of sanity both to accept 'GDR-logic' and to ignore it. 'If you took things as seriously as people in the west think we must have, we would have all killed ourselves!

Anna Funder

#17. Private travel into foreign countries can be requested without conditions [ ... ]. Permission will be granted instantly. Permanent relocations can be done through all border checkpoints between the GDR into the FRG or Berlin (West).

Gunter Schabowski

#18. Apparently, even in the GDR, sleep deprivation amounted to torture, and torture, at least of minors, was not official policy.

Anna Funder

#19. Our church has been legal since late 1960s. I've been involved since 1972. I was ordained in 1975.

Sally Kirkland

#20. Brandenburg Beer War," fought out in the courts, lasted for ten years - all over a black beer brewed in the former GDR that contained sugar, something forbidden by the Purity Law.

Neil MacGregor

#21. Acknowledge the good around you and the simplicity it takes to recognise it

Moonish Sood

#22. If we had had time and the occasion to develop a new socialism in the GDR, socialism with a human face, with democracy, this might have been an example also to West Germany. The development would have run the other way.

Stefan Heym

#23. I never felt the GDR was my home country.

Angela Merkel

#24. The penalties for being an accessory to the attempt to flee the [GDR] were greater than the crime of trying to flee itself.

Anna Funder

#25. I only have so much energy, so something had to go. This is why, at the end of the day, I've preserved my sanity for the children and also manage to do my best at work.

Kiri Te Kanawa

#26. For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers. You have to look at how normal people manage with such things in their pasts.

Anna Funder

#27. The history of the GDR journalism is a story of partisanship.

Patrick Conley

#28. I'm using the grid as formation. I wanted a relationship between the paintings and videos so that way when you are looking at the videos there's a direct relationship to the paintings.

Mickalene Thomas