German Quotations

In 1913, the noted German actor and director Paul Wegener was making a film in Prague when he heard the legend of Rabbi Loew, who created a golem to protect the inhabitants of the Prague ghetto from persecution.

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?'

The dark outside world of Paris under German occupation exerted a strong containing pressure.

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.

Well, my first languages are German and Spanish because I was brought up by a Spanish mother and a German father, so I always spoke both languages at home. I'm very thankful that I was brought up in a bilingual house.

It has been possible to trace historically back to a very early age the taxes which were imposed on medicines, spices and similar substances in German towns. Thus, for instance, one finds that in the year 1500, thirteen, in 1540, thirty-eight, and in 1708, already one hundred and twenty vegetable oils are mentioned.

Since the German people, with unparalleled heroism, but also at the cost of fearful sacrifices, has waged war against half the world, it is our right and our duty to obtain safety and independence for ourselves at sea.

From each one of them rose separate columns of smoke, meeting in a pall overhead, and through the smoke came stabbing flashes of fire as German shells burst with thudding shocks of sound. This was the front line of battle.

When I was a kid, while touring East Berlin - back when there was an East Berlin - I got my left foot stuck in an escalator in Alexanderplatz. A few hours later, thanks to blowtorches and chainsaws and East German soldiers and the U.S. Embassy, my foot was released, and I along with it.

My father had been in the German Diplomatic Service, and although he had been in the United States since World War II and out of diplomacy, it was something that was very much talked about in the family. So when I went to college, it was always my intention to try to get into the Foreign Service.

I studied classical opera, so I was always singing in Italian and German and French.

The German Emperor is ageing me; he is like a battleship with steam up and screws going, but with no rudder, and he will run into something some day and cause a catastrophe.

I never do the cute thing with animals; they are interesting shapes. I just use their profile. Because German shepherds are so easily recognizable, they would fall outside my purview.

English policy may not yet have made the definite decision to attack us; but it doubtless wishes, by all and every means, even the most extreme, to hinder every further expansion of German international influence and of German maritime power.

My first languages are German and Spanish because I was brought up by a Spanish mother and a German father, so I always spoke both languages at home. I'm very thankful that I was brought up in a bilingual house.

Language patterns solidify at 10, 11, 12, so I was able to learn English fairly easily, with no accent. I didn't do speech or vocal work to get rid of the German accent; I was just lucky.

How rich our German life is compared to France or England: what an abundance of social types and customs with completely different origins... Germany is a world, whereas England and France, with their stereotypically divided three social classes, are but enlarged villages... what a stage for a Balzac.

General Howe turned out some German wild boars and sows in his forests, to the great terror of the neighbourhood; and, at one time, a wild bull or buffalo: but the country rose upon them and destroyed them.

Our thoughts fly therefore by themselves in this festive hour of our plant community, to the man whom we thank for the ressurection of our Nation: Adolf Hitler, the patron of German labour and German art.

I scored a movie called 'Endangered Species'. I worked on another movie called 'Staying Alive'. A German film called 'Fire and Ice'.

Dirk is like the German Moses, invincible and inspiring. That is why 'His Name Is Dirk' must be the Official Fan Song for Dirk Nowitzki.

A very considerable body of the German people live in America and propose to fight that Government. Bourke in his great speech last week welcoming the Belgian mission to Boston worked out the President's meaning with care.

The German Air Force was not sufficient to protect the sea crossing on its own. While the leading part of the forces might have landed, there was the danger that they might be cut off from supplies and reinforcements.

German businessmen are overwhelmed by the high cost of doing business. Inflexible rules, enforced by a burgeoning bureaucracy, discourage entrepreneurship.

In the late '70s I was asked to sing for the first time in Germany. I'll never forget it. It was at a festival in Bremen. The German audience went berserk and the reviews were a phenomenon. For some reason the German audience understood how technically challenging this music was; it wasn't just someone yelling their head off.

Through years of secret work, scientific and basic ground work was laid, in order to be ready again to work the German Armed Forces at the appointed hour, without loss of time or experience.

Like a lot of kids, I had a Superman cake or different theme cakes, but then I hit the age where I think my mom thought I was ready for the German chocolate cake that she makes for my dad. Just the sight of that, the taste of that frosting, just reminds me of being at home with my mom and my dad and my sister and my friends.

When you ask your white friends what their cultural heritage is, they don't just say white. They give you a math equation. 'Well, I'm a third German and a fourth Irish and one-sixteenth Welsh and one-fortieth Native American for college applications.'

I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse.

Over a period of 20 years, German reunification has cost 2 trillion euros, or an average of 100 billion euros a year. So, we have to ask ourselves: Aren't we willing to pay a tenth of that over several years for Europe's unity?

I worked as a lawyer; as a member of the teaching staff of a technical college; and then I worked principally as legal adviser to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers Party.

Of course no one thought of anything except of attacking the enemy. It lies in the instinct of every German to rush at the enemy wherever he meets him, particularly if he meets hostile cavalry.

I had furthermore spoken on the assumption that Russia would mobilize, whereas the assumption of the German Government had hitherto been, officially, that Serbia would receive no support; and what I had said must influence the German Government to take the matter seriously.

The United States is our most important ally. They helped us many times. Without the United States, the unification or German democratisation after the Nazi period would have been much more complicated, or almost impossible.

I'm actually more German than Scottish. I'm half-Japanese, 25 percent German, 12 percent Scottish, and 12 percent Irish.

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

It was also my idea that the advisory committees of the Academy should replace the legal committees of the German Reichstag, which was gradually fading into the background in the Reich.

The Cinquecento was an engine of motivation at Fiat. It refurbished the image of the entire company. It's a symbol for the company, but it's more than that. It's a global Italian symbol, as Mini is a global British symbol and the Beetle is a global German symbol.

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.

Historically, the French have had a romantic attachment to their bikes. Though the first functioning two-wheeler is thought to have been invented by a German in 1817, it was the French who popularized and marketed the device in the 1860s, giving it the name 'bicycle.'

As a child, I grew up the son of German immigrant parents, so I grew up being teased and called 'Fritz' at school. When I married my wife and went to live in Vienna, I was teased for being a Brit.

It is particularly moving, and I can say this also as a Protestant Christian, that a German - one of us - has been made Pope,

Based on German prototypes, green walls and roofs are a natural idea in Singapore's tropical environment, where mosses, ferns, philodendrons, orchids and other epiphytes literally grow on trees.

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.

There is nothing false or arrogant about German pride in German technical and business skills.

For me, at least, much of the German I see and hear sounds stranger than Swedish, a language of which I unfortunately understand very little.

Spotting a rare bird is never worth the bite of a cur. Once bitten by a German shepherd, I knew that I preferred cats, even if they are bird-killers. Life is long enough for more than one chance at a rare bird.

From the material point of view the proposal is unacceptable, for France, without further territory in Europe being taken from her, could be so crushed as to lose her position as a Great Power, and become subordinate to German policy.

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.

In particular, I studied German and Russian biomechanics.

I said to the German Ambassador that, as long as there was only a dispute between Austria and Serbia alone, I did not feel entitled to intervene; but that, directly it was a matter between Austria and Russia, it became a question of the peace of Europe, which concerned us all.

At the beginning of June 1944, the war was reaching a climax. German troops had been brutalised by the savagery of the ongoing fighting in Russia, where the Red Army was secretly preparing its vast encirclement of the Germans' Army Group Centre.

In fact I enjoyed every minute of my life at King's, especially the discovery of French and German literature.

The German debt to the Jewish people can never end, not in this generation and not in any other.

Living in Manhattan opened me to whole new sets of things to envy, study, gather and imagine stealing. A full-size 1809 German harp, beautifully painted with three goddesses, covered in a pea-green coat of great silvery refinement: mine for $180. Though all its strings were broken, its beauty let it claim a quarter of my one - bedroom.

It's maybe hard to believe, but as a kid I really had a lot of self-doubts. My father was very ill - he was an alcoholic - so there were a lot of things that built up for me. And because I was going to a Catholic school in a small German town, a lot of it was suppressed. I was angry and didn't know how to get it out.

I must say to you that my intensions for instance doing German, it is because Victoria de los Angeles is nothing to do with wanting to be like a German singer.

My most interesting correspondence is with my translators. I marvel at their sensitivity over certain passages that just anyone, even if he knows German well, would not appreciate.

I have always been considered to be the most German among Italian economists, which I always received as a compliment, but was rarely meant to be one.

The police officers, so far as discipline, organization, pay, and orders were concerned, came exclusively under the German Reich police system and were in no way connected with the administration of the Government General.

I don't like traditions, I am very personal, very independent, I don't like intimate ladies, I mean in German lieder there's a lot of copy, a lot of imitation, a lot of tradition, and this I have put it aside.

Thirty percent of Americans have German blood in their family. I don't see any major difference in the engineering abilities of Americans and Germans.

The readership of Victorian novels, when they were published, was much less diverse. People were probably white, and had enough money to be literate. Very often, there are phrases in Italian, German and French that are left untranslated.

The German future lies in the hands of our Fuehrer.

German football is like English football. The Germans and the English do not play like a Brazilian side. They have to improve, bring up their young players, who have character.

I'm never without my dog. They would be in every corner of the house, and my wife will not allow me to have any more than that. But I have lots of dogs. I love the dogs. I breed them. I always have a puppy coming. And I show dogs. I show German shepherds.

If you want to judge the performance of the Egyptian people by the standards of German or Chinese or American culture, then there is no room for judgment.

With respect to the respective French and German traditions you are no doubt correct, although I am reluctant to see individual achievement reduced to archetypes.

I started to do theater when I was a little boy at school, and then, I think because my father was a documentary filmmaker and worked for German television, I was of course fascinated by what he did.

One reason why so little is known about the German resistance is because it was never a united movement in the way that it was in France or Poland. It was simply too dangerous.

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.

You gotta understand, my great-grandfather was German and Irish. My grandmother was Indian, and my grandfather was African-American, so we all got a little something in us.

The Swedish language combines the strong manhood of the German with the delicate beauty of the Italian.

French and German illustrate the misleading character of apparent grammatical simplicity just as well.

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.

German is more familiar now since I live part of the year in Rome and part in the German part of Switzerland. But it's not difficult to sing in German; it's difficult to feel in German. This takes time. It's a culture.

I do think there is much truth in the Young German idea that marriage is a shockingly immoral institution, as well as what we have long known it for - an extremely disagreeable one.

The earth is bountiful, and where her bounty fails, nitrogen drawn from the air will refertilize her womb. I developed a process for this purpose in 1900. It was perfected fourteen years later under the stress of war by German chemists.

On the first 'Indiana Jones' movie, I tore an ACL in one of my knees - can't remember which knee. The scene in which I was fighting the big German mechanic on an airplane called a flying wing, I was run over by the landing gear and injured my knee, but I can't remember which one it was. Lots of bumps and injuries along the way.

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.

I'm very aware of my own background. I'm Irish, French, and then a little bit of everything else thrown in, ranging from German to Native American. We're talking about tiny drops of blood.

In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexuals wore pink lambdas.

I am a pure-blooded Polish nobleman without a single drop of bad blood - certainly not German blood.

We spoke no German, nor ate any German foods.

We believe that Douglas should continue to outperform the German retail sector. Recent economic data suggest that German consumer confidence is improving.

Wha the deil hae we got for a king, / But a wee, wee German lairdie!

Writers lock up themselves into their language. I locked up myself into my language situation, where only new high German is spoken.

We have no indication that the cartoon row has had a negative effect on trade and business there. The top executives in the region are highly educated and have close relations with their German counterparts. They are not affected by the conflict.

We have no indication that business connections have gotten worse between German enterprises and their partners in the Middle East.

There is a risk (to the recovery from the VAT hike) but since we are seeing stronger growth then there is a bigger chance that the German economy can actually withstand it.

We didn't want to bring him here. A German court forced us to take him.

When I'm working with German audiences, I will call on my Rilke and Goethe in the original.

This raises the chances of an easing in French and German rates before the year end.

We can no more blame it on good Middle Eastern citizens than we can blame Hitler on people of German descent,

Loyalty to allies is an important and central issue in German foreign policy but reason must always take priority,

She will repair bridges, and that will restore some German weight to the EU.

significant pressure on German companies to unwind their complex web of relationships.

She can thank her lightning political career to the fact that Helmut Kohl needed to have a woman and an east German in his cabinet in 1991. By appointing Merkel, Kohl killed two birds with one stone.

She appeals to the German brain, if not the German heart. She doesn't inspire strong emotions. But she does inspire strong thinking about what is truly best for the nation.

Since German reunification in 1990, historians and researchers have been free to work in the East, where the lost Nazi art collection disappeared.