#germans

It was the noise Of ancient trees falling while all was still Before the storm, in the long interval Between the gathering clouds and that light breeze Which Germans call the Wind's bride. ↗

— Charles Godfrey Leland

#before #between #breeze #bride #call

Germans don't speak in a German accent, they just speak German. ↗

— Daniel Day-Lewis

#german #germans #just #speak

If you look at casualties, you find countries that had much higher loss rates per capita than the US. Denmark comes to mind, the United Kingdom, they have suffered heavy losses at various points, the Germans as well. ↗

— David Petraeus

#casualties #comes #countries #denmark #find

A book is worth a few francs; we Germans can afford to destroy those. We all may not appreciate artistic merit, but cash value is another matter. ↗

— Paul Scofield

#another #appreciate #artistic #book #cash

I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships—gone. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to 'make a new start' or to be 'born again': Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a 'clean' sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov's microcosmic miniature story 'Signs and Symbols,' which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective. The album of the distraught family contains a faded study of Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#anonymity #born-again #clean-slate #extinction #family

When the movie was done, Number Five was crated up. Eric took him over to Germany; displayed him over there because Germans really liked this movie. It was very popular with them. ↗

— John Badham

#displayed #done #eric #five #germans

What people still do not like to admit is that there were two crimes in the form of one. Just as the destruction of Jewry was the necessary condition for the rise and expansion of Nazism, so the ethnic cleansing of Germans was a precondition for the Stalinization of Poland. I first noticed this point when reading an essay by the late Ernest Gellner, who at the end of the war had warned Eastern Europeans that collective punishment of Germans would put them under Stalin's tutelage indefinitely. They would always feel the guilty need for an ally against potential German revenge. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#eastern-european #ernest-gellner #ethnic-cleansing #genocide #germans

The trouble with Germans is not that they fire shells, but that they engrave them with quotations from Kant. ↗

— Karl Kraus

#germans #kant #quotations #shells #them

One of the key problems is that the Germans know what they do because everywhere they go there's a 'made in Germany' label on it - they can feel proud of Volkswagens and Audis and Mercedes. ↗

— Evan Davis

#everywhere #feel #germans #germany #go

There's more than a few remnants left in German welfare policy today. Many Germans eagerly condemn Hitler's fascism but won't examine the other reasons why the Third Reich succeeded for a season. ↗

— Suzanne Fields

#eagerly #examine #fascism #few #german