Top 435 German Quotes

I am not the German Tony Blair. Nor am I the German Bill Clinton. I am Gerhard Schroeder, chancellor of Germany, responsible for Germany. I don’t want to be a copy of anyone.

America took me into her bosom when there was no longer a country worthy of the name, but in my heart I am German – German in my soul.

The reason given by the President in asking Congress to declare war against Germany is that the German government has declared certain war zones, within which, by the use of submarines, she sinks, without notice, American ships and destroys American lives.

I have a big scar in my thigh from a dog bite by my German shepherd. His name was Ripper. He was trying to get in a fight with another dog, and I tried to break it up, and he got me pretty good.

My understanding, when I think of immigration, is like… you know, this country was built on immigrants: the German, the Polish, the Italian, the Jewish, the Russians, the Eastern Europeans. So, all these people came in, and I don’t know who decided like, ‘No, that’s it! There’s a cap on it! No more people.’

The intellectual bourgeois of the old Empire – tepid and unimaginative, mentally slow, arrogant, and incorrectly trained – has proven his incapacity to be the bearer of German culture. His benumbed world is now toppled, its spirit is overthrown, and is in the midst of being recast into a new mold.

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.

Most American fascists are enthusiastically supporting the war effort. They are doing this even in those cases where they hope to have profitable connections with German chemical firms after the war ends.

The rate of growth of the management skills of any country is inversely proportional to the number of MBAs. Germany produces no MBAs, but America used to produce MBAs by the millions, and you saw the German economy, until at least the ’90s, was certainly more efficient than the American economy.

One of my assistants found this old German machine. It was originally used to make underwear. Like Chanel, who started with underwear fabric – jerseys – we used the machine that made underwear to make something else.

If we remind ourselves of the fact that every fifth American today rightly points and perhaps also with a certain degree of pride to his German ancestry or her German ancestry, we can safely say that we, indeed, share common roots.

A German immersed in any civilization different from his own loses a weight equivalent in volume to the amount of intelligence he displaces.

For me, it was pretty hard to go into the studio and sing English for the first time, because I always sung in German, and we’ve been making music for seven years and it’s always been in German.

All German women are beautiful.

My mom was from Germantown and was of German descent. She was a real force behind me and my dream. She was always my biggest fan, even when I was wrestling at an early age.

German football is very different to football in South America.

Italian football’s different to Spanish and German, but it’s only different and not inferior.

The Italian futurists, the German expressionists, and the British vorticists were fascinated by speed and the ways the modern world was shattering conventions. The old ways of painting, writing, sculpting, and composing no longer seemed adequate to capture the world.

The German police were actually after me when I was first in Stoke. They had put pictures of my face on the trees in Bremen and said: ‘Find this guy.’ They said I had an €80 fine to pay or something. But I spoke to my lawyer and I didn’t owe anything.

The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.

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 German experience, as you can see, did move me very much. Seeing that terrible destruction and seeing the miserable state of the people, how they had been beaten down by the war through no fault of their own probably.

When I first heard Kraftwerk, I thought they were an American band singing in German.

One day I heard a speech of Hitler. In this speech he said that the German factory worker and the German labourer must make common cause with the German intellectual worker.

Consideration of any kind are a crime against the German people and the soldier at the front.

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

I used to lie in bed and imagine I was performing at the Albert Hall, not that I’d ever been there. I took lessons with a German teacher when I was quite young. But it turned out I had a very high soprano voice, which I didn’t like at all.

You cannot stoke the fires of prejudice against German people and then not find that somewhere, sometime down the road it doesn’t discharge.

If I go to Germany, I learn something in addition. The German television is very precise and respectable. One has never stress. In Italy it is more dynamic. But I amuse myself madly in both countries.

Russians call me German, Germans call me Russian, Jews call me a Christian, Christians a Jew.

I’m German in my mind, but from a Germany that doesn’t exist any more.

That Germany was so immensely strong and Austria so dependent upon German strength that the word and will of Germany would at the critical moment be decisive with Austria.

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.

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.

A university anywhere can aim no higher than to be as British as possible for the sake of the undergraduates, as German as possible for the sake of the public at large-and as confused as possible for the preservation of the whole uneasy balance.

I really want to do a film in another language. My dad’s from Germany, so it’d be really cool to do a film in German. I’m not quite fluent, but I can get there. And my accent’s pretty good. I wouldn’t feel too out of my element.

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.

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

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.

With German teams, they always sit together – there are no phones on the table.

The cliches that circulate in the German media about Joachim Sauer are a total fallacy. The fact is that he’s his own man. He’s witty, he’s profound, he can be incredibly funny, and he’s an extremely bright guy.

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

I’ve lived for 10 years in Switzerland, so I speak German.

What is it to be white? It does mean something to be Norwegian. It means something to be Polish or German or Spanish. But ‘white’ is simply a catchall for ‘light-skinned person.’ It doesn’t really mean anything.

Bulgaria was the only Axis country to deflect insistent German demands for the deportation of its Jews.

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 herewith commission you to carry out all preparations with regard to… a total solution of the Jewish question in those territories of Europe which are under German influence.

My hair story has been unique because my mom’s a German Jew, so her hair is way different than my hair. She was always learning on my hair growing up, but I would sit there for hours, and she did learn how to braid hair. Early on, it was a lot of tears while my mom was braiding my hair.

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.

I want to do a record with Adam Green of all German schlager songs.

Great architects like Taut, Mendelsohn, and Gropius built some astonishing buildings which were to change the way architects around the world thought. Brecht and Weill forever changed musical theatre; Kaethe Kollwitz and others changed German perceptions of the purposes of art.