Quotes About German History

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. It's not right to think about all of Jewish-German history as shrouded by the smoke of the crematorium.

Simon Schama

#4. Dachau-the significance of this name will never be erased from German history. It stands for all concentration camps which the Nazis established in their territory.

Eugen Kogon

#5. Hitler was no inexorable product of a German 'special path', no logical culmination of long-term trends in specifically German culture and ideology. Nor was he a mere 'accident' in the course of German history.

Ian Kershaw

#6. Something new has happened: For the first time in German history our fatherland is guided by a plan that considers only the needs of the people, and aims at building prosperity and reconstructing of our fatherland.

Walter Ulbricht

#7. I am imprinted with the whole sense of European history, especially German history, going back to World War I, which really destroyed all the old values and culture. My grandparents had been reasonably well-off but they became quite poor, living in an attic apartment.

Lisel Mueller

#8. The mere fact that my comments have caused such strong protests, although I'm not a European, and also the fact that I have been compared with certain persons in German history indicates how charged with conflict the atmosphere for research is in your country. Here in Iran you needn't worry.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

#9. When has there ever been a government in German history that came to the people and revealed its detailed plans for the coming years? That could not happen before, since German governments planned war and conquest.

Walter Ulbricht

#10. Nothing would have been changed for the German people, but my name would have gone down in history as that of the greatest traitor.

Gerd Von Rundstedt

#11. There was nothing conservative about Adolf Hitler. Hitler was an artist and a revolutionary at heart. He wanted to completely upend and remake German society.

A.E. Samaan

#12. [On school uniforms] Don't these schools do enough damage making all these kids think alike, now they have to make them look alike too? It's not a new idea, either. I first saw it in old newsreels from the 1930s, but it was hard to understand because the narration was in German.

George Carlin

#13. Throughout the history of the Deutschritter the German genius is very evident, romantic idealism implemented with utter ruthlessness.

Desmond Seward

#14. The German national character is a favorite subject of character experts, probably because the less mature a nation, the more she is an object of criticism and not of history.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

#15. These handkerchief gardens are a traditional German solution to apartment dwellers' yearning for a tool shed and a vegetable garden. They make a patchwork of green in odd corners of urban land, along train lines or canals or, as here, in the lee of the Wall.

Anna Funder

#16. Only the language of civilized people may be spoken, thus no German.

Anne Frank

#17. A German goldsmith covered a bit of metal with cloth in the 14th century and gave mankind its first button. It was hard to know this as politics, because it plays like the work of one person, but nothing is isolated in history
certain humans are situations.

Lyn Hejinian

#18. Overriding all of them, however, was the memory of 1918, the belief that the Jews, wherever and whoever they might be, threatened to undermine the German war effort, by engaging in subversion, partisan activities, Communist resistance movements and much else besides.

Richard J. Evans

#19. In another chapter I have told you how in the year 800 a German chieftain had become a Roman Emperor. Now in the year 1066 the grandson of a Norse pirate was recognised as King of England. Why should we ever read fairy stories, when the truth of history is so much more interesting and entertaining?

Hendrik Willem Van Loon

#20. Ad they entered Berlin, while still killing off the last of its German defenders, The Russians indulged in an orgy of rape and rage beyond the bounds of human Imagination. Over the course of ten days, about 130,000 women were raped

Andrei Cherny

#21. In the last days before the attack a strange feeling, not so much of confidence as of fatalism, pervaded the German tank forces- if this strength, this enormous agglomeration that surrounded them on every side, could not break the Russians, then nothing would.

Alan Clark

#22. The days are numbered for those bums over in England."
German Tank commander

Leo McKinstry

#23. And the history of civilization is littered with dead "races" (Frankish, Italian, German, Irish) later abandoned because they no longer serve their purpose - the organization of people beneath, and beyond, the umbrella of rights.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#24. Few developments central to the history of art have been so misrepresented or misunderstood as the brief, brave, glorious, doomed life of the Bauhaus - the epochally influential German art, architecture, crafts, and design school that was founded in Goethe's sleepy hometown of Weimar in 1919.

Martin Filler

#25. It is almost certain that we will fail. But how will future history judge the German people, if not even a handful of men had the courage to put an end to that criminal?

Henning Von Tresckow

#26. For centuries, the Yangtze River - the longest in Asia - has played an important role in China's history, culture, and economy. The Yangtze is as quintessentially Chinese as the Nile is Egyptian or the Rhine is German. Many businesses use its name.

Rebecca MacKinnon

#27. Occasionally I would like the German people to give us the benefit of the doubt, given our history, as opposed to assuming the worst
assuming that we have been consistently your strong partners and that we share a common set of values.

Barack Obama

#28. Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of the Second World War could have been very different.

Gordon Brown

#29. My family history, like that of many Polish, German and Jewish families from Central Europe in the 20th century, is complex.

Donald Tusk

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. Suppressed I Rise is for anyone interested in a very personal, human view of the history of World War II. A mother's attempt to protect and raise her two young daughters in hostile NAZI Germany challenges her sensibilities and resourcefulness.

Hank Bracker

#36. The process of which I am speaking is nothing less than a conservative revolution on such a scale as the history of Europe has never known. Its object is form, a new German reality, in which the whole nation will share.

Hugo Von Hofmannsthal

#37. I would sum up the German character best by saying that they are the best of losers and the worst of winners.

Edmund Ironside

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

#39. Universal education is the most corroding and disintegrating poison that liberalism has ever invented for its own destruction.

Adolf Hitler

#40. When I'm in England, I know I'm a visitor, but being a white man in England with ancestry that's German and Italian, I have a history with the Romans and the Saxons. I feel some connection and ancestry here, as weird as that sounds.

Nicolas Cage

#41. Now according to German logic, a declaration of war was found to be unnecessary because of imaginary bombings

Barbara W. Tuchman

#42. What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.

Thomas Mann

#43. Egyptologists, skilled in piecing together the papyri of lost civilisations, suddenly discovered that the same talent could be applied to working out the pattern of German radio traffic.

Robert Harris

#44. World War II ended in a battle for a single buildng, Germany's Reichstag ... 7,000 German troops defending the building ... Nearly 5,000 men died in a battle for the building.

Andrei Cherny

#45. There are times throughout history and it doesn't take long for either an American or a German, to think about times in the history of their country where the law provided the Government to do things which were not right.

Edward Snowden