Top 100 German Quotes
#1. Up until the First World War, when people turned anti-German, Germany had been described by American political scientists as the model of democracy.
Noam Chomsky
#2. In effect, I was asking that if Russia mobilized against Austria, the German Government, who had been supporting the Austrian demand on Serbia, should ask Austria to consider some modification of her demands, under the threat of Russian mobilization.
Edward Grey
#3. For German Social Democracy, Europe is vital to the national interest.
Martin Schulz
#4. The German soldier has impressed the world, however the Italian Bersagliere soldier has impressed the German soldier.
Erwin Rommel
#5. Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill.
Flann O'Brien
#6. It's awful undermining to the intellect, German is; you want to take it in small doses, or first you know your brains all run together, and you feel them flapping around in your head same as so much drawn butter.
Mark Twain
#7. My family history, like that of many Polish, German and Jewish families from Central Europe in the 20th century, is complex.
Donald Tusk
#9. The American Jewish Committee has pioneered the German-Jewish-American dialogue.
Klaus Kinkel
#10. German businesspeople have invested a great deal in our country, and trade is flourishing. We want to speed up economic cooperation. Your country is a large, important provider of aid, and it has done a great deal to reduce the poverty of many Vietnamese.
Nguyen Minh Triet
#11. Don't let the actions of a few determine the way you feel about an entire group. Remember, not all German's were Nazis.
Erin Gruwell
#12. What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.
Sylvia Plath
#13. One of the students was a doctor, a German woman, and I used to watch her scouring garbage pails as though she were preparing a room for surgery.
Brother Andrew
#14. The fuhrer of the Third Reich has freed the German man from his external humiliation and from the inner weakness caused by Marxism - and has returned him to the ancestral Germanic values of honor, loyalty and courage.
Conrad Grober
#15. At a European auto show, I had someone from a German car company come up to me and say the Karma should cost $125,000, not $87,900, but our development process lets us lower the costs. I guarantee it's profitable.
Henrik Fisker
#16. The larger the German body, the smaller the German bathing suit and the louder the German voice issuing German demands and German orders to everybody who doesn't speak German. For this, and several other reasons, Germany is known as 'the land where Israelis learned their manners'.
P. J. O'Rourke
#17. The mixture of Sarmatic and German blood had contributed to improve the features of the Alani, to whiten their swarthy complexions, and to tinge their hair with a yellowish cast, which is seldom found in the Tartar race.
Edward Gibbon
#18. Todd says that the doctor was rather horrified because we passed a German who had had his head shot off, but his arms and legs were still waving about and strange noises were coming out of him, and i thought even the doctor was a bit turned over by that.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#19. The German stamp on Wisconsin endures in the state's commitment to efficient agriculture, hard work, education, culture, and to good citizenship and political freedom - all of which were an integral part of the German immigrant's language.
Richard H. Zeitlin
#20. Me and Schopenhauer. Sometimes being German seems to come with some serious disadvantages.
Philip Kerr
#21. Altogether one quarter of German territory was lost in 1945, territory which had for many centuries belonged to Germany.
Neil MacGregor
#22. My grandmother was German. She was an immigrant, and my great grandfather fought in World War I and was stationed in France.
Lisa Papademetriou
#23. I am Michael, and I am part English, Irish, German, and Scottish, sort of a virtual United Nations.
Michael Scott
#24. No matter how educated you are, no matter how irrational it seems, you will follow a glimmer of hope. The National Socialist German Workers Party, it was that ray of light. Nothing else was working to fix Germany
Jodi Picoult
#25. The government of the German Democratic Republic rejects secret policies. It works for the people, and only the people, so it does not need to keep secrets like the warmongers.
Walter Ulbricht
#26. I spent a little time in Germany as a schoolboy learning German, and it's a country I knew very well, spent a lot of time in. I knew the history very well. I've always wanted to do a piece of work about the post-war period, of one sort or another.
Stephen Daldry
#27. I'd like to set a story in Australia, but I would need to feel confident my German and U.S. readers, for example, would stay with me.
Michael Robotham
#28. The Language Laboratory at Cambridge is a very good way of finding out about grammar and the vocabulary and that's why I learned to read German and later on I added Spanish, the standard European languages.
Clive James
#29. The German decision to fight is implacable. Even if they were given more than they ask, they would attack just the same, because they are possessed by the demon of destruction.
Galeazzo Ciano
#30. On quantum theory I use up more brain grease (rough translation of German idiom) than on relativity.
Albert Einstein
#31. Strict shopping laws mean that most German shops close on Saturday afternoons, reopening only on Monday when everybody is back at work.
Luke Harding
#32. Forcing school children to recite a national pledge doesn't sound very American to me," said James. "No," agreed Holmes. "It sounds German. Very German.
Dan Simmons
#33. I had old bunk beds that my dad got from Seabrook Farms. They were first used by German prisoners during World War II, who were sent to work the farms during the war. The metal beds with their thin mattresses could easily be used as a jungle gym and I loved them.
David Mixner
#34. It is interesting to note that Copernicus was German/Polish, Luther was German, and Gutenberg was German.
George Friedman
#35. It is easier for a cannibal to enter the Kingdom of Heaven through the eye of a rich man's needle that it is for any other foreigner to read the terrible German script.
Mark Twain
#36. A German psychologist says that women talk more than men because they have a bigger vocabulary. But, it evens out because men only listen half the time.
Jay Leno
#37. The German Reich is a Republic, and whoever doesn't believe it gets one in the neck.
Alfred Doblin
#38. God grant that this is the work of the Communists. You are witnessing the beginning of a great new epoch in German history. This fire is the beginning.
Adolf Hitler
#39. It's funny, isn't it," Miss Woolf whispered in Ursula's ear, "how much German music we listen to. Great beauty transcends all. Perhaps after the war it will heal all too.
Kate Atkinson
#40. Cristiano reminds me of German tennis player Michael Stich. He was destined to make history, but then Boris Becker showed up. Cristiano is so fast, so strong, so incredible, but he has one problem: Leo Messi.
Jurgen Klopp
#41. "Even Dwarfs Started Small," Calla replied immediately. "In the original German: Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen."
Maura winced, though Blue couldn't tell if it was at the movie or at Calla's accent.
Maggie Stiefvater
#42. Over 30 years ago, Airbus was founded by a European consortium of French, German, and later Spanish and British companies to compete in the large commercial aircraft industry with U.S. companies.
Norm Dicks
#43. I found my smattering of German very useful here, indeed, I don't know how I should be able to get on without it.
Bram Stoker
#44. The quality of the Neues Museum's construction is extraordinary even by German standards, and people can smell that quality. The concept would not have been so convincing without it.
David Chipperfield
#45. The city's legions of working men disagreed. They always had counted Harrison as one of their own, "Our Carter," even though he was a plantation-reared Kentucky man who had gone to Yale, spoke fluent French and German, and recited lengthy passages from Shakespeare.
Erik Larson
#46. Oh, sweet thy current by town and by tower, The green sunny vale and the dark linden bower; Thy waves as they dimple smile back on the plain, And Rhine, ancient river, thou'rt German again!
Horace Binney Wallace
#47. The days of the Cross are counted. We must deliver the German nation from the pernicious influence of Christianity.
Erich Ludendorff
#48. It's possible that the name Bettini came up at some point during a conversation with the German Cycling Federation's anti-doping commission, but I certainly didn't claim that he gave me any drugs. They made that up. Bettini warned me: If you said that, then things could get dangerous for you.
Patrik Sinkewitz
#49. I'd rather have a German Division in front of me than a French one behind.
George S. Patton
#50. The Swedish language combines the strong manhood of the German with the delicate beauty of the Italian.
Bayard Taylor
#51. More reforms will give more impetus to German industries to invest in India. German companies want to be treated on par with Indian companies, and creation of an equitable market is crucial for investments.
Angela Merkel
#52. German writers in the late 18th century were the first to uphold a prickly, literary nationalism, in reaction to the then dominance and prestige of French literature.
Pankaj Mishra
#53. Our fifty principal cities contain 39.3 per cent of our entire German population, and 45.8 per cent of the Irish. Our ten larger cities only nine per cent of the entire population, but 23 per cent of the foreign.
Josiah Strong
#54. Rainer Maria Rilke was admittedly not a Dockers tagger, but a sort of European equivalent: a German poet - in many respects, a charlatan masquerading as a genius who turned out to be a genius.
Richard Flanagan
#55. I knew German history well, and out of my experiences in the rest of the world I believed to know the German kind; therefore I never doubted that, although for the time being all indications were against it, one day a change would come.
Gustav Krupp
#56. The West German population would protest passionately if it knew what secret meetings between the federal chancellor, McCoy, and foreign and Nazi generals are planning.
Walter Ulbricht
#57. Having people like that in your service degrades such service, when they are going around the world like beggars." Such was the advice from her Majesty, Empress of the German Empire, on the subject of hiring Wolfgang Mozart.
Robert Spaethling
#58. We couldn't generalize on the people. Some of them were known to be tough guys and they didn't say much, but some of them were kind of soft-headed, but they did that. That was an East German film.
James Stockdale
#59. Whatever music sounds like, I am glad to say it does not sound in the smallest degree like German.
Oscar Wilde
#60. The phlegamtic female is a weepy, bug-eyed, fat, lumpy, fleshy German. She looks like a sack of flour. She is born in order to become a mother-in-law. That is her whole ambition.
Anton Chekhov
#63. I am half Puerto Rican, a quarter German and a quarter black. That was always a big issue for me - being mixed race - because casting directors tended to be very like, 'OK, are you Hispanic for this role?' 'Or is she going to be African American?'
Naya Rivera
#64. 'Cullum' is Scottish, but I'm nowhere near Scottish. My mother is Burmese, and my father is of German, Jewish, English ancestry.
Jamie Cullum
#65. The East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; the Greek and the Roman world, that some are free; the German World knows that All are free. The first political form therefore which we observe in History, is Despotism, the second Democracy and Aristocracy, the third, Monarchy.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#66. German test pilot Ernst Canter noted in his logbook that while in 1910 he flew at a height of eighty feet, two years later he was ascending to almost 5,000.
Max Hastings
#67. I write entirely in English; Tagalog chauvinists chide me for this. I feel no guilt in doing so. But I am sad that I cannot write in my native Ilokano. History demanded this; if it isn't English I am using now, I would most probably be writing in Spanish like Rizal, or even German or Japanese.
F. Sionil Jose
#68. My first endeavor was to save the core of the German system of justice: the independent judiciary.
Hans Frank
#69. I think school is so important. I was good student. A rebel, but I did well in my studies. I don't close myself to anything. I liked reading and I still love learning. I loved history and German.
Bruno Tonioli
#70. But as my brother was doing his research for a book about my father, it became his opinion that the most influential anti-semitism my father encountered when he was growing up was from Jews, because his relatives were German Jews, and doctors.
Tobias Wolff
#71. The German people is not marked by original sin, but by original nobility.
Alfred Rosenberg
#72. I beg you, no matter what happens, no matter where you go in life or how many millions you make, no matter anything, I beg you: never buy a German car.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#73. Paine and Joel Barlow attempted to change Jefferson's mind, urging him to settle thrifty German immigrants in the new lands and to permit black families to travel from other states to acquire their own land there, but the sugar interest triumphed,
Christopher Hitchens
#74. When German companies take over firms in India, it is seen as normal. When an Indian buys one or two firms in Germany, that is something special.
Tulsi Tanti
#75. That cat was a spy. You had to take a pot shot at it. It was a very clever German midget dressed up in a cheap fur coat.
J.D. Salinger
#76. Museums collect what's important in their respective countries. In Berlin's National Gallery, however, this isn't the case. They're interested neither in me nor the other usual suspects. It's simply a German reality.
Georg Baselitz
#77. Freedom from militarism will give the German people the opportunity, if they will but seize it, to apply their great energies and abilities to the works of peace.
James F. Byrnes
#78. When Hitler declared war on the United States, he was betting that German soldiers, raised up in the Hitler Youth, would always out fight American soldiers, brought up in the Boy Scouts. He lost that bet. The Boy Scouts had been taught how to figure their way out of their own problems.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#79. The German leaders, said Winston Churchill, turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.
Robert K. Massie
#80. There's a difference between a Nazi and a German.
Samuel Fuller
#81. On May 17, 1933, before the Reichstag, Hitler delivered his "Peace Speech," one of the greatest of his career, a masterpiece of deceptive propaganda that deeply moved the German people and unified them behind him and which made a profound and favorable impression on the outside world.
William L. Shirer
#82. His conclusion, preserved for posterity, was that the experiment of interning families of suspected nationalities - German, Japanese, Italians, and others - was a failure. Nonetheless,
Jan Jarboe Russell
#83. You can always reason with a German. You can always reason with a barnyard animal, too, for all the good it does.
P. J. O'Rourke
#84. The story of my marriage, which is the great joy and astonishment of my life, is too much like a fairy tale, the German kind, unsweetened by Disney.
Ann Patchett
#85. If I were king of the world, babies born in airplanes, balloons and blimps would, instead of choosing to be German, Maldivian or American, all get special heavenly blue passports with a stork on the cover labeled 'Sky Baby' - and they'd be allowed to come and go anywhere they please.
Robert Krulwich
#86. In July 2011, U.S. Soccer announced that they'd fired Bob Bradley and hired Jurgen Klinsmann as head coach. Jurgen had once been a world-class German striker; now he was regarded as a successful, if controversial, coach.
Tim Howard
#87. The dark outside world of Paris under German occupation exerted a strong containing pressure.
Gerard Debreu
#88. The previous year it had taken England all their time to beat the full German team in an international and I had taken with me the programme from that match.
Dixie Dean
#89. The reason these paintings are destined for New York is not because I am disappointed about a lack of German interest, but because MoMA asked me, and because I consider it to be the best museum in the world.
Gerhard Richter
#90. English wine is like Belgian rock or German disco: a waste of everyone's time and money.
Jay Rayner
#91. German businessmen are overwhelmed by the high cost of doing business. Inflexible rules, enforced by a burgeoning bureaucracy, discourage entrepreneurship.
Suzanne Fields
#92. A woman that is like a German clock, Still a-repairing, ever out of frame, And never going aright, being a watch, But being watched that it may still go right!
William Shakespeare
#93. I would not rob you of your food or your clothes or your umbrella, but if I caught your German out I would take it. But I don't study any more,- I have given it up.
Mark Twain
#94. That's it! said Jo to herself, when she at length discovered that genuine good will toward one's fellow men could beautify and dignify even a stout German teacher, who shoveled in his dinner, darned his own socks, and was burdened with the name of Bhaer.
Louisa May Alcott
#95. In order to provide the German housewife, above all mothers of many children ... with tangible relief from her burdens, the Fuhrer has commissioned me to bring into the Reich from the eastern territories some four to five hundred thousand select, healthy, and strong girls.
Fritz Sauckel
#96. Heresy is usually quite sophisticated, actually has a meaning, and is to be taken very seriously. It is therefore to be carefully distinguished from turgid, pretentious, badly-written Bullsgeshichte, to use the technical German theological term.
Carl R. Trueman
#97. It is the accursed inventions of this century that are ruining everything--artilleries, bombards, and, above all, printing, that other German pest. No more manuscripts, no more books! printing will kill bookselling. It is the end of the world that is drawing nigh.
Victor Hugo
#98. We hear a great deal about the German "Fatherland" - we like the sound. But the word "Father" is the whole of it. The "land" is nothing: the "Father" is key to the music.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#99. Royce is the father of the thesis that German idealism is a story about the discovery and development of the Kantian transcendental ego - the "I" that accompanies all my representations - as an absolute cosmic supersubject who, god-like, creates the entire universe.
Frederick C. Beiser
#100. My sons are into German music, but they are into all kinds of music.
Keith Emerson
