Selected Quotations, Authors with names starting H

"The capacity for individual life and happiness is less developed among Germans than among other peoples. In France and England I observed with astonishment and envy, but also learned to appreciate, what a wealth of simple joy and what an inexhaustible source of lifelong pleasure the Frenchman finds in eating and drinking, intellectual debate and the artistic pursuit of love; and the Englishman in the cultivation of gardens, the companionship of animals and the sports and hobbies he pursues with such childlike gravity. The average German knows nothing of the sort."

"Like English puritanism [Prussian] demands severity, dignity, abstinence from the pleasures of life, attention to one's duty, loyalty, honesty, indeed self-denial and a sombre scorn for the world. Just like his English counterpart the Prussian puritan keeps his sons short of pocket-money and frowns at their youthful experiments with love."

Robert Hall

"Your position never gives you the right to command. It only imposes on you the duty of so living your life that others may receive your orders without being humiliated."

"Sometimes when I reflect back on all the wine I drink I feel shame. Then I look into the glass and think about the workers in the vineyards and all of their hopes and dreams. If I didn't drink this wine, they might be out of work and their dreams would be shattered. Then I say to myself, "It is better that I drink this wine and let their dreams come true than be selfish and worry about my liver."

"The aim is to produce in Germany a state of devastation in which surrender is inevitable ... The Battle of Berlin progresses. It will continue as opportunity serves and circumstances dictate, until the heart of Nazi Germany ceases to beat." 25.11.1943

"There can now be no doubt that it is Stalin rather than Hitler who is the most alarming figure of the twentieth century. I say this not merely because Stalin killed more people than Hitler - although he clearly did - and not even because Stalin was more of a psychopath than Hitler - although he clearly was. I say it because Stalin, unlike Hitler, has not yet been exorcised. And also because Stalin was not a one-off like Hitler, an eruption from nowhere. Stalin stands in a historical tradition of rule by terror which existed before him, which he refined, and which could exist again. His, not Hitler's, is the spectre that should worry us.
You hail a taxi driver in Munich - you don't find the driver displaying Hitler's portrait in his cab do you? Hitler's birthplace isn't a shrine. Hitler's grave isn't piled with fresh flowers every day. You can't buy tapes of Hitler's speeches on the streets of Berlin. Hitler isn't routinely praised as 'a great patriot' by leading German politicians. Hitler's old party didn't receive more than forty per cent of the votes in the last German election -"

"There is no tradition of private property in Russia. First of all there were workers and peasants who had nothing and the nobility owned the country. Then there were workers and peasants with nothing and the Party owned the country. Now there are still workers and peasants with nothing and the country's owned, as it's always been owned, by whoever has the biggest fists. Unless you understand that, you can't begin to understand Russia." from Archangel .

"The pioneer makes the country by using the gifts within it to his needs." from Content to lie in the sun

"There have to be crooks in this world too. If everyone were honest with each other they'd soon start punching each other's noses." The Good Soldier Svejk

"Today, I am sure it was right to fight, to show that Britain still had the will to resist armed aggression. Victory in the Falklands laid the ghost of Suez to rest, the failure that had overhung British governments and the British people since 1956" Battle for the Falklands

"Despair leads to apathy, apathy to conformity, conformity to routine performance which is then quoted as 'mass political involvement'." [from Letter to Gustav Husák]

"My dear fellow citizens: for forty years you have heard from my predecessors on this day different variations of the same theme: how our country flourished, how many millions of tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us. I assume that you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you."

"We live in a contaminated moral environment. We have fallen morally ill because we became used to saying one thing and thinking another. We have learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Notions such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, or forgiveness have lost their depth and dimensions." New Year's address to the Czech and Slovak people, 1990.

"More likely, I feel myself to be a child because our democracy is in nappies, and with it out Parliament and our president are also in nappies." (10/91)

"I am not an optimist, because I am not sure that everything ends well. Nor am I a pessimist, because I am not sure that everything ends badly. I just carry hope in my heart. Hope is a feeling that life and work have a meaning. You either have it or you don't, regardless of the state of the world that surrounds you.
Life without hope is an empty, boring and useless life. I cannot imagine that I could strive for something if I did not carry hope in me. I am thankful to God for this gift. It is as big a gift as life itself."

"Because the regime itself is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to prosecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing." [Power of the Powerless, 1978 ]

"Natürlich ist die demokratie bemüht, die Wünsche und Bedürfnisse der Bevölkerung zu erfüllen. In der Zeit einer weitreichenden Umgestaltung der Wirtschaft, der Rechtsordnung und des ganzen Lebens geht jedoch nicht alles auf einmal. Es ist unmöglich, alles so schnell zu tun, wie es die Menschen wünschen. Dies ruft, was verständlich ist, eine gewiees Unzufriedenheit und Ungeduld hervor,übrigens auch in anderen postkommunistischen Ländern, und dies eröffnet natürlich Raum für Demagogen, die einfache und schnelle Lösungen anbieten, wie auch für Leute, die nach einer Regierung der strengen Hand rufen."

Heinrich Böll on Havel: "Beware ! Here speaks a rebel, one of that dangerous breed, the soft and polite."

"I have found that as President one has at times to try to understand everything - or at least pretend that one does."

"We are bound to say the truth about ourselves, above all for the sake of ourselves and our descendants." April 1993

"Although history never quite repeats itself, and just because no development is inevitable, we can in a measure learn from the past to avoid a repetition of the same process."

"If in the long run we are the makers of our own fate, in the short run we are the captives of the ideas we have created."

"The fundamental principle [of liberalism] that in the ordering of our affairs we should make as much use as possible of the spontaneous forces of society, and resort as little as possible to coercion, is capable of an infinite variety of applications."

"Most people still believe it is possible to find some Middle Way between "atomistic" competition and central direction. Nothing seems at first more plausible, or is more likely to appeal to reasonable people, that the idea that our goal must be neither the extreme decentralisation of free competition, nor the complete centralisation of a single plan, but some judicious mixture of the two methods .. Both competition and central direction become poor and inefficient tools if they are incomplete; they are alternative principles used to solve the same problem, and a mixture of the two means that neither will really work and that the result will be worse that if either system had been consistently relied upon. Planning and competition can be combined only by planning for competition, but not by planning against competition."

"From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step."

"The rules of which our common moral code consists have progressively become fewer and more general in character. From the primitive man who was bound by an elaborate ritual in almost every one of his daily activities, who was limited by innumerable taboos, and who could scarcely conceive of doing things in a way different from his fellows, morals have more and more tended to become merely limits circumscribing the sphere within which the individual could behave as he liked."

"Economic planning of the collectivist kind necessarily involves the very opposite of this. The planning authority cannot confine itself to providing opportunities for unknown people to make whatever use of them they like. It cannot tie itself down in advance to general and formal rules which prevent arbitrariness. It must provide for the actual needs of people as they arise and then choose deliberately between them. It must constantly decide questions which cannot be answered by formal principles only, and in making these decisions it must set up distinctions of merit between the needs of different people. When the government has to decide how many pigs are to be reared or how many buses are to be run, which coal mines are to operate, or at what prices boots are to be sold, these decisions cannot be deduced from formal principles, or settled for long periods in advance. They depend inevitably on the circumstances of the moment, and in making such decisions it will always be necessary to balance one against the other the interests of various persons and groups. In the end somebody's views will have to decide whose interests are more important; and these views must become part of the law of the land, a new distinction of rank which the coercive apparatus of government imposes upon the people.
Formal rules are thus merely instrumental in the sense that they are expected to be useful to yet unknown people, for purposes for which these people will decide to use them, and in circumstances which cannot be foreseen in detail.
They do not involve a choice between particular ends or particular people, because we just cannot know beforehand by whom and in what way the will be used.
The state should confine itself to establishing rules applying to general types of situations, and should allow the individuals freedom in everything which depends on the circumstances of time and place, because only the individuals concerned in each instance can fully know these circumstances and adapt their actions to know them." The Road to Serfdom