Prussians

"Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat the enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: War is such a dangerous business that mistakes that come from kindness are the very worst."

"To introduce into the philosophy of War itself a principle of moderation would be an absurdity."

"War is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds."

"Since war is not an act of senseless passion but is controlled by its political object, the value of this object must determine the sacrifices to be made for it in magnitude and also in duration. Once the expenditure of effort exceeds the value of the political object, the object must be renounced and peace must follow. We see then that if one side cannot completely disarm the other, the desire for peace on either side will rise and fall with the probability of further successes and the amount of effort these would require. If such incentives were of equal strength on both sides, the two would resolve their political disputes by meeting half way. If the incentive grows on one side, it should diminish on the other. Peace will result so long as their sum total is sufficient — though the side that feels the lesser urge for peace will naturally get the better bargain."

"[...] so sind ihm zwei Eigenschaften unentbehrlich [...] Der erstere ist bildlich mit dem französischen Ausdruck coup d'oeil bezeichnet worden, der andere ist die Entschlossenheit."

"Die Entschlossenheit ist ein Akt des Mutes in dem einzelnen Fall, und wenn sie zum Charakterzug wird, eine Gewohnheit der Seele. Aber hier ist nicht der Mut gegen körperliche Gefahr, sondern der gegen die Verantwortung, also gewissermaßen gegen Seelengefahr gemeint. Man hat diesen oft courage d'esprit genannt, weil er aus dem Verstande entspringt, aber er ist darum kein Akt des Verstandes, sondern des Gemüts. Bloßer Verstand ist noch kein Mut, denn wir sehen die gescheitesten Leute oft ohne Entschluß. Der Verstand muß also erst das Gefühl des Mutes erwecken, um von ihm gehalten und getragen zu werden, weil im Drange des Augenblicks Gefühle den Menschen stärker beherrschen als Gedanken."

"Wir sagen es also noch einmal: ein starkes Gemüt ist nicht ein solches, welches bloß starker Regungen fähig ist, sondern dasjenige, welches bei den stärksten Regungen im Gleichgewicht bleibt, so daß trotz den Stürmen in der Brust der Einsicht und Überzeugung wie der Nadel des Kompasses auf dem sturmbewegten Schiff das feinste Spiel gestattet ist."

"Action in war is like movement in a resistant element. Just as the simplest and most natural of movements, walking, cannot easily be performed in water, so in war it is difficult for normal efforts to achieve even moderate results."

"The invention of gunpowder and the constant improvement of firearms are enough in themselves to show that the advance of civilization has done nothing practical to alter or deflect the impulse to destroy the enemy, which is central to the very idea of war."

"The worst of all conditions in which a belligerent can find himself is to be utterly defenseless."

"Men are always more inclined to pitch their estimate of the enemy's strength too high than too low, such is human nature."

"...only the element of chance is needed to make war a gamble, and that element is never absent."

"... in the whole range of human activities, war most closely resembles a game of cards."

"Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating."

"With uncertainty in one scale, courage and self-confidence should be thrown into the other to correct the balance. The greater they are, the greater the margin that can be left for accidents."

"Blind aggressiveness would destroy the attack itself, not the defense."

"Our discussion has shown that while in war many different roads can lead to the goal, to the attainment of the political object, fighting is the only possible means."

"Any complex activity, if it is to be carried on with any degree of virtuosity, calls for appropriate gifts of intellect and temperament. If they are outstanding and reveal themselves in exceptional achievements, their possessor is called a 'genius'."

"If the mind is to emerge unscathed from this relentless struggle with the unforeseen, two qualities are indispensable: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead."

"... the role of determination is to limit the agonies of doubt and the perils of hesitation when the motives for action are inadequate."

"Of all the passions that inspire a man in a battle, none, we have to admit, is so powerful and so constant as the longing for honor and renown."

"Obstinacy is a fault of temperament. Stubbornness and intolerance of contradiction result from a special kind of egotism, which elevates above everything else the pleasure of its autonomous intellect, to which others must bow."

"...self-reliance is the best defense against the pressures of the moment."

"Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult."

"Architects and painters know precisely what they are about as long as they deal with material phenomena. … But when they come to the aesthetics of their work, when they aim at a particular effect on the mind or on the senses, the rules dissolve into nothing but vague ideas."

"Modern wars are seldom fought without hatred between nations; this serves more or less as a substitute for hatred between individuals."

"...soldierly simplicity of character that has always represented the military at its best. In the higher ranks it is different. The higher a man is placed, the broader his point of view. Different interests and a wide variety of passions, good and bad, will arise on all sides. Envy and generosity, pride and humility, wrath and compassion - all may appear as effective forces in this great drama."

"...talent and genius operate outside the rules, and theory conflicts with practice."

"The more physical the activity, the less the difficulties will be. The more the activity becomes intellectual and turns into motives which exercise a determining influence on the commander's will, the more the difficulties will increase."

"Great things alone can make a great mind, and petty things will make a petty mind unless a man rejects them as completely alien."

"Knowledge in war is very simple, being concerned with so few subjects, and only with their final results at that. But this does not make its application easy."

"...an intellectual instinct which extracts the essence from the phenomena of life, as a bee sucks honey from a flower. In addition to study and reflections, life itself serves as a source."

"Knowledge must be so absorbed into the mind that it ceases to exist in a separate, objective way."

"...it is better to go on striking in the same direction than to move one's forces this way and that."

"There are times when the utmost daring is the height of wisdom."

"Thus it has come about that our theoretical and critical literature, instead of giving plain, straightforward arguments in which the author at least always knows what he is saying and the reader what he is reading, is crammed with jargon, ending at obscure crossroads where the author loses its readers. Sometimes these books are even worse: they are just hollow shells. The author himself no longer knows just what he is thinking and soothes himself with obscure ideas which would not satisfy him if expressed in plain speech."

"Anyone who feels the urge to undertake such a task must dedicate himself for his labors as he would prepare for a pilgrimage to distant lands. He must spare no time or effort, fear no earthly power or rank, and rise above his own vanity or false modesty in order to tell, in accordance with the expression of the Code Napoléon, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."

"Essentally combat is an expression of hostile feelings. But in the large-scale combat that we call war hostile feelings often have become merely hostile intentions. At any rate, there are usually no hostile feelings between individuals. Yet such emotions can never be completely absent from war. Modern wars are seldom fought without hatred between nations; this serves as a more or less substitute for the hatred between individuals. Even when there is no natural hatred and no animosity to start with, the fighting itself will stir up hostile feelings: violence committed on superior orders will stir up the desire for revenge and retaliation against the perpetrator rather than against the powers that ordered the action. It is only human (or animal, if you like), but it is a fact."

"A prince or general can best demonstrate his genius by managing a campaign exactly to suit his objectives and his resources, doing neither too much nor too little."

"What we should admire is the acute fulfillment of the unspoken assumptions, the smooth harmony of the whole activity, which only become evident in the final success."

"Where execution is dominant, as it is in the individual events of a war whether great or small, then intellectual factors are reduced to a minimum."

"If we do not learn to regard a war, and the separate campaigns of which it is composed, as a chain of linked engagements each leading to the next, but instead succumb to the idea that the capture of certain geographical points or the seizure of undefended provinces are of value in themselves, we are liable to regard them as windfall profits. In so doing, and in ignoring the fact that they are links in a continuous chain of events, we also ignore the possibility that their possession may later lead to definite disadvantages."

"...in war, the advantages and disadvantages of a single action could only be determined by the final balance."

"The moral elements are among the most important in war. They constitute the spirit that permeates war as a whole, and at an early stage they establish a close affinity with the will that moves and leads a whole mass of force, practically merging with it, since the will is itself a moral quantity. Unfortunately they will not yield to academic wisdom. They cannot be classified or counted. They have to be seen or felt. … It is paltry philosophy if in the old-fashioned way one lays down rules and principles in total disregard of moral values. As soon as these appear one regards them as exceptions, which gives them a certain scientific status, and thus makes them into rules. Or again one may appeal to genius, which is above all rules; which amounts to admitting that rules are not only made for idiots, but are idiotic in themselves."

"The commander's talents are given greatest scope in rough hilly country. Mountains allow him too little real command over his scattered units and he is unable to control them all; in open country, control is a simple matter and does not test his ability to the fullest."

"Boldness will be at a disadvantage only in an encounter with deliberate caution, which may be considered bold in its own right, and is certainly just as powerful and effective; but such cases are rare."

"Timidity is the root of prudence in the majority of men."

"Boldness governed by superior intellect is the mark of a hero."

"...as man under pressure tends to give in to physical and intellectual weakness, only great strength of will can lead to the objective."

"Beauty cannot be defined by abscissas and ordinates; neither are circles and ellipses created by their geometrical formulas."

"If a segment of one's force is located where it is not sufficiently busy with the enemy, or if the troops are on the march - that is, idle - while the enemy is fighting, then these forces are being managed uneconomically. In this sense they are being wasted, which is even worse than using them inappropriately."

"...any move made in a state of tension will be of more important, and will have more results, than it would have made in a state of equilibrium. In times of maximum tension this importance will rise to an infinite degree."

"The state of crisis is the real war; the equilibrium is nothing but its reflex."

"All war presupposes human weakness and seeks to exploit it."

"What is the object of defense? To preserve. To preserve is easier than to acquire."

"Every suspension of offensive action, either from erroneous views, from fear or from indolence, is in favor of the side acting defensively."

"If defense is the stronger form of war, yet has a negative object, it follows that it should be used only so long as weakness compels, and be abandoned as soon as we are strong enough to pursue a positive object."

"But if the assailant, without troubling himself about the existence of the Army awaiting his attack in a defensive position, advances with his main body by another line in pursuit of his object, then he 'passes by the position,' and if he can do this with impunity, and really does it, he will immediately enforce the abandonment of the position, consequently put an end to its usefulness."

"Surprise becomes effective when we suddenly face the enemy at one point with far more troops than he expected. This type of numerical superiority is quite distinct from numerical superiority in general: it is the most powerful medium in the art of war."

"Phillipsburg was the name of one of those badly drawn fortresses resembling a fool with his nose too close to the wall."

"The Conqueror is always a lover of peace: he would prefer to take over our country unopposed."

"A conqueror is always a lover of peace (as Bonaparte always asserted of himself); he would like to make his entry into our state unopposed; in order to prevent this, we must choose war, and therefore also make preparations, that is in other words, it is just the weak, or that side which must defend itself, which should be always armed in order not to be taken by surprise; so it is willed by the art of war. (Original German: "Der Eroberer ist immer friedliebend (wie Bonaparte auch stets behauptet hat), er zöge ganz gern ruhig in unseren Staat ein; damit er dies aber nicht könne, darum müssen wir den Krieg wollen und also auch vorbereiten, d. h. mit anderen Worten: es sollen gerade die Schwachen, der Verteidigung Unterworfenen, immer gerüstet sein und nicht überfallen werden; so will es die Kriegskunst.")"

"A general who allows himself to be decisively defeated in an extended mountain position deserves to be court-martialled."

"...only a fraction of book learning will seep into practical life anyhow; and the more foolish the theory, the less of it."

"On War constitutes the most important single work ever written on the subject. It has inspired general staffs, radical thinkers like Marx and Mao Tse-tung, and (with the start of the Cold War) jargon-ridden American academic studies of "strategy", huge in size but low in payload. Yet, oddly enough, Clausewitz figures little in university courses on political thought. Why Burke, Rousseau and J.S. Mill, but not Clausewitz? It is because his analysis is far too politically incorrect to be acceptable to the liberal mindset that has prevailed in Western academia since the mid-19th century. But such is Clausewitz's continuing power that small-l liberals even including, sad to say, John Keegan, author of this year's Reith Lectures – are at vast pains to dismiss his thinking as irrelevant, outmoded, dangerous or, absurdly, amoral."

"What lessons, then, does the case of Clausewitz...offer to a military historian asked to ponder the future of war over the next 170 years? The first is that it would be pointless to imagine that future in terms of even the most advanced military technology of today. Everything that Clausewitz wrote, about the actual conduct of operations became irrelevant within 50 years, because firepower became transformed by breechloading, rifling and the machine-gun, while logistics and communications were transformed by the railway and the electric telegraph... Rather than thus seek to predict how wars will be operationally conducted and with what technology, it is more useful to return for guidance to Clausewitz's fundamental insights into the enduring nature of conflict and the relationship between war and politics. He famously wrote that "war is a continuation of policy by other means", meaning that it is not just a regrettable breakdown of a natural human harmony (as in the liberal view), but a tool of political purpose, and one which should be governed throughout its course by political, not purely military considerations. War, he further observes, is an act of violence intended to compel an opponent to fulfil our will."

"One cannot help feeling that Liddell Hart was prejudiced against Clausewitz in the profoundest sense. He writes throughout as though the latter was advocating unlimited war to the exclusion of all alternatives, whereas even a superficial reading shows Clausewitz's intention to have been quite different; namely to suggest that total war was at one end of the spectrum of inter-state violence. Napoleon's campaigns had shown that modern nations in arms were capable of fighting such "total" wars and, once manifested, it was unlikely that similar wars would not occur in the future. But total war was "ideal" for Clausewitz only in the philosophical sense: his reiterated phrases to the effect that war must be subordinated to policy and is indeed only "a continuation of state policy with an admixture of other means" gives the lie to Liddell Hart's misrepresentation. In numerous places where Liddell Hart criticises him, Clausewitz is only coolly and accurately describing what tends to happen in war. The former gives the game away when he remarks: "Perhaps the harm might have been avoided if his book had been viewed in the light that its title implied—as a treatise on the nature of war, instead of as a practical guide to the conduct of war." Yet this is precisely the mistake that Liddell Hart himself repeatedly makes."

"His is not simply the greatest but the only truly great book on war."

"1870 woke us out of that sleep, for it gave us an enemy formed by the teaching of history—by the study of concrete facts. It was in such a fashion that Scharnhorst, Willisen and Clausewitz had, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, formed the Command of the Prussian Army. In order to know and understand war they had not confined themselves to examining the tool which is used in warfare, and taking it to pieces in its component material parts without taking man—who uses it—into account. In the Book of History, carefully analysed, they had found the living Army, troops in movement and action with their human needs, passions, weaknesses, self-denials, capacities of all sorts: "Far from being an exact science, war is a dreadful and impassioned drama.""

"In his eyes the main object of the state was to manufacture war power instead of merely insuring itself against war. What Clausewitz really did was to democratize war, and when the spirit of his doctrines was coupled with that of Darwin's "The Origin of Species" (1859), they produced the Prussian Military System; and when united with that of Karl Marx's Das Kapital (1867), they produced the Russian Military System. All three writers based their theories upon "mass struggle" — in war, in life and in economics."

"It was during the period of calm that one of the most important works of military science was composed, Vom Kriege (‘On War’), by the director of the Prussian War Academy, Carl von Clausewitz. This little-read but much-criticised book contains the first attempt to create a philosophy of war and to analyse its characteristics from a detached standpoint. It played a great part in forming the attitude of mind of several generations of German General Staff Corps officers. From it derives that striving to observe both men and affairs coolly and sensibly which has been the foremost quality of all outstanding members of the German General Staff. It served also to strengthen the patriotism and the idealism which inspired such officers."

"Although Moltke did not follow Clausewitz's teachings on the proper relationship between war and politics, on many other points he was the key link between On Wars philosophical speculations and the theory and practice of the Prussian army. Writing after the Second World War, General Staff officer Hermann Teske wrote that Moltke was the incarnation of the Clausewitzian theory. In the essays printed here, the reader will find ample conformation that Moltke employed Clausewitzian thinking and specific terms in numerous cases. Both Clausewitz and Moltke emphasised the primacy of battle and annihilation of the main enemy army. Both accepted uncertainty in warfare and emphasised improvisation over permanent or binding doctrine. Both emphasised the need for speed in making and executing decisions rather than lengthy searches for ideal solutions. Both emphasised moral factors in war and the need for independent action by local commanders, although Moltke certainly carried this farther than did Clausewitz. Both rejected the idea that systems could ever replace individual talent, and neither believed that any firm rules were possible in warfare."

"Herbert Rosinski concluded that Moltke was the man who applied Clausewitz's pure theory to the sphere of practical action. Waldemar Erfurth, an important German military writer and general in the Second World War, argued that Moltke freed the Prussian General Staff from Jomini's theories, led it into the intellectual world of Clausewitz, Scharnhorst, and Gneisenau, and developed Clausewitz's operational teachings in light of nineteenth-century developments."

"We all know the dictum of Clausewitz, one of the most famous writers on the philosophy and history of war, which says: “War is a continuation of policy by other means.” This dictum comes from a writer who reviewed the history of wars and drew philosophic lessons from it shortly after the period of the Napoleonic wars. This writer, whose basic views are now undoubtedly familiar to every thinking person, nearly eighty years ago challenged the ignorant man-in-the-street conception of war as being a thing apart from the policies of the governments and classes concerned, as being a simple attack that disturbs the peace, and is then followed by restoration of the peace thus disturbed…"

"If one weighs his influence and his emphasis, one might describe him historically as the Mahdi of mass and mutual massacre. For he was the source of the doctrine of "absolute war", the fight to a finish theory which, beginning with the argument that "war is only a continuation of state policy by other means", ended by making policy the slave of strategy."

"Clausewitz's principle of force without limit and without calculation of cost fits, and is only fit for, a hate-maddened mob. It is the negation of statesmanship—and of intelligent strategy, which seeks to serve the ends of policy."

"[T]he rascal has a ‘common sense’ bordering on wit."

"It is difficult not to feel that Clausewitz was right in teaching that "you must concentrate against the main enemy, who must be overthrown first", and that "the armed forces form the true objective", at least in any war where there is a genuine ideological issue."

"By considering a few of Clausewitz's statements in isolation and christening him the "Mahdi of Mass," Basil Liddell Hart portrayed him as an intellectual forerunner of the commanders of the First World War, who for three-and-a-half years found no way out of the stalemate of the Western front, with its hundreds and thousands of casualties each week. For having stated that war was merely the continuation of policy by other means, Clausewitz was charged with minimising differences between peace and war, and thus making war more acceptable. But that accusation was based on a misunderstanding of the larger theoretical purpose of this definition: to identify political decisions as the common cause of war, which—if the leadership was rational—should also determine the degree of violence needed to achieve the political purpose. This misinterpretation fed into the view held by John Keegan, among others, that Clausewitz saw nothing morally reprehensible in war, and that his theories contributed to the boundless violence of the world wars and their ancillary conflicts in the twentieth century. To misread Clausewitz, and then ascribe to his ideas a greater influence than the world's actual experience with Napoleonic war, the vast expansion of armed forces throughout the nineteenth century, industrialisation, modern technology, and new ideologies, is, however, to fail to distinguish between historical events and their analyst."

"[T]he characterisation of Clausewitz as a conservative fails to place him in the Prussian context, and, on the other hand, does not recognise that in the 1820s even a Briton with Clausewitz's views would have been a very odd Tory indeed. Clausewitz welcomed the destruction of corporative society in Prussia, to which he himself had contributed during the reform era; he believed in equality before the law, in a strong militia or Landwehr based on universal military service, in an independent judiciary, ministerial responsibility, a limited franchise, and a parliament with advisory functions. These views had much in common with early German liberalism, which still considered representative institutions less important than a professional and honest administration and a strong executive, able to defend Germany against east and west. Clausewitz's emphasis on a powerful central authority had conservative implications; yet it placed him in opposition to those conservatives who were more concerned with maintaining the traditional order of society than with increasing the power of the state, and neither Prussian conservatives nor the crown had any patience with the idea of a parliament, however limited its functions."

"Clausewitz's position on domestic issues was heavily influenced by his view of foreign affairs as they affected the security of the Prussian state. He was immune to the Byronic idealisation of liberation and freedom, valued stability, and trusted the balance of power to overcome or contain most international crises, as long as the strongest states had the ability and will to resort to war to defend the independence of the international community. That some smaller states might be sacrificed in the process, he accepted as inevitable. But at the same time he believed that Prussia would be stronger politically and militarily if its passive subjects turned into active citizens, serving in an army made up of regulars and a strong Landwehr, an institution that would give the middle class new openings to influence and power. On domestic affairs Clausewitz's views tended toward liberalism, on foreign affairs toward conservatism. In France and Britain before the Reform Act of 1832, these opinions might have placed him among moderates; in Prussia they sufficed to brand him Jacobin."

"If one compares Clausewitz and Foch, one will see that Foch before the World War strongly emphasized the demoralization of the enemy as the military objective; whereas Clausewitz, thinking more coolly and more comprehensively, reminded his readers that the capture or killing of the enemy constitutes in the tactical sphere the final destruction of his ability to fight on, whereas his moral overthrow constitutes only a conditioned, or generally only a temporary elimination."

"Clausewitz was anything but a mere expert, a technician of the military craft. As shown by his poetic and expressive language alone, his way was a truly creative mind, richly endowed, open to all the sensations of nature, the full wealth of the human spirit. All in all he represented a most curious and rare combination of philosophical contemplation and impatience for action, of cold, lucid intellect and passionate sensitivity—a reflective spirit who ardently longed for heroic deeds with an ambition that was never to be fulfilled. He was, therefore, virtually predestined to cast the essence of the Prussian military spirit into a literary form none had found before him."

"His Protestation of 1812 is by far the purest and most powerful expression of the new spirit of militancy that inspired the patriots of 1812–1813. Among other things it contains a virtual catalogue of political virtues and vices, a brief summary of the new militant political ethic, so to speak. Clausewitz solemnly rejected everything that might buffer the iron necessity of a life-and-death struggle, or that might tempt man to evade it—such things as the "frivolous hope" for a favourable chance; languid inaction while blindly waiting what the future might bring; "unworthy servility and flattery" to appease tyrants; "false resignation" and "unreasoning distrust" of one's own capacity; "culpable neglect of duty" toward the general good; and above all cowardly submission and the "shameless surrender of the country's and people's honour, of the personal dignity of man." What he pledged instead was to shed the last drop of blood for life's freedom and dignity; to put king and country above all else; to regard their preservation as a "most sacred duty"; to "meet danger with manly courage, calm and firm resolve, and full awareness"; to be prepared to make the "supreme sacrifice" without fear or false cunning, free of all selfishness, inspired by the "glorious struggle for freedom and the dignity of the fatherland.""

"That the General Staff succeeded in preserving the lessons learned at such cost in the struggle against Napoleon, was to a large extent the work of Clausewitz. Among the whole group of the Reformers, Clausewitz had been from the outset the theoretician par excellence. Not in the sense of a one-sided abstract academic pedant, but as a practical soldier, who at the same time happened to be that rare phenomenon, a natural born theorist; combining a keen appreciation of the requirements of a sound theory, with a unique understanding of the practical uses to which it could be put. During the wars against Napoleon a series of mishaps kept Clausewitz in relatively subordinate positions incommensurate with his exceptional abilities. After the peace had been reestablished, he was confined for twelve dreary years, from 1818 to 1830 to a purely administrative post as military director of the War Academy in Berlin. There, out of the intense feeling of frustration that forced him to seek an outlet for his gifts and energies in his private studies arose a long series of military studies, culminating in his famous treatise On War, the most profound, comprehensive, and systematic examination of war that has appeared to the present day."

"[H]e far transcended the two great inspirations of his life: Scharnhorst and Napoleon. Out of Scharnhorst's fragmentary and aphoristic heritage he developed the systematic, closely knit, perfectly balanced theory, in which every factor, every aspect, every argument had its place from which it could not be removed without fatally endangering the delicate balance of the whole. From the deep appreciation of the revolution wrought by Napoleon in the art of war, he reached an infinitely broader conception embracing within its elastic framework and majestic sweep every conceivable form of warfare and strategy... [T]he impression it made when it was published after his death through the devoted efforts of his widow and friends was extraordinary. The circle of those who noticed it was at first not large, and the magnitude of his achievement, even in its fragmentary form, was far too great to be taken in at once. But his perfect mastery of his subject, the intuitive genius with which he had succeeded in expressing what his contemporaries consciously or subconsciously felt, the charm of his style deeply affected all those who read it. By a process of infiltration, the influence of his ideas spread through the higher ranks of the army, influencing the thoughts of men and replacing the far more superficial, if much more easily assimilable, doctrines of his Swiss contemporary and rival Jomini. That process, going on unobtrusively throughout the middle decades of the 19th Century, came to a full and open conclusion after the sudden death of Reyher when the leadership of the General Staff was entrusted to Moltke, who combined in an almost perfect balance the technical mastery of the conduct of operations developed in the General Staff with his profound insight into the deeper issues developed in Clausewitz's great treatise."

"We must renounce attempts at building an absolute revolutionary strategy out of the elements of our limited experience of the three years of civil war, during which units of a particular quality fought under particular conditions. Clausewitz warned very well against this. "What could be more natural," he wrote, "than the fact that war of the French Revolution had its characteristic style, and what theory could have been expected to accommodate it? The danger is that this kind of style, developed out of a single case, can easily outlive the situation that gave rise to it: for conditions change imperceptibly. That danger is the very thing a theory should prevent by lucid, rational criticism. In 1806 the Prussian generals were under the sway of this methodism", and so on. Alas! Prussian generals are not the only ones with an inclination towards methodism, that is, towards stereotypes and conventional patterns."

"[Clausewitz] quite understands that you must break the enemy's will, for which he suggests three processes: first to crush his army, and then to take his capital and, if that is not enough, to occupy his territory."

"The wish to talk to God is absurd. We cannot talk to one we cannot comprehend — and we cannot comprehend God; we can only believe in Him. The uses of prayer are thus only subjective."

"Religion is too important a matter to its devotees to be a subject of ridicule. If they indulge in absurdities, they are to be pitied rather than ridiculed."

"The body is a temple."

"Moral Teleology supplies the deficiency in physical Teleology, and first establishes a Theology; because the latter, if it did not borrow from the former without being observed, but were to proceed consistently, could only found a Demonology, which is incapable of any definite concept."

"Freedom is the alone unoriginated birthright of man, and belongs to him by force of his humanity; and is independence on the will and co-action of every other in so far as this consists with every other person’s freedom."

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."

"...happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination, resting solely on empirical grounds."

"Since the narrower or wider community of the peoples of the earth has developed so far that a violation of rights in one place is felt throughout the world, the idea of a cosmopolitan right is not fantastical, high-flown or exaggerated notion. It is a complement to the unwritten code of the civil and international law, necessary for the public rights of mankind in general and thus for the realization of perpetual peace."

"Beneficence is a duty. He who often practices this, and sees his beneficent purpose succeed, comes at last really to love him whom he has benefited. When, therefore, it is said, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," this does not mean, "Thou shalt first of all love, and by means of love (in the next place) do him good"; but: "Do good to thy neighbour, and this beneficence will produce in thee the love of men (as a settled habit of inclination to beneficence).""

"There are three juridical attributes that inseparably belong to the citizen by right. These are:"

"# Constitutional freedom, as the right of every citizen to have to obey no other law than that to which he has given his consent or approval;"

"# Civil equality, as the right of the citizen to recognize no one as a superior among the people in relation to himself...; and"

"# Political independence, as the right to owe his existence and continuance in society not to the arbitrary will of another, but to his own rights and powers as a member of the commonwealth."

"Men will not understand … that when they fulfil their duties to men, they fulfil thereby God's commandments; that they are consequently always in the service of God, as long as their actions are moral, and that it is absolutely impossible to serve God otherwise."

"As everybody likes to be honoured, so people imagine that God also wants to be honoured. They forget that the fulfilment of duty towards men is the only honour adequate to him. Thus is formed the conception of a religion of worship, instead of a merely moral religion. … Apart from moral conduct, all that man thinks himself able to do in order to become acceptable to God is mere superstition and religious folly. If once a man has come to the idea of a service which is not purely moral, but is supposed to be agreeable to God himself, or capable of propitiating him, there is little difference between the several ways of serving him. For all these ways are of equal value. … Whether the devotee accomplishes his statutory walk to the church, or whether he undertakes a pilgrimage to the sanctuaries of Loretto and Palestine, whether he repeats his prayer-formulas with his lips, or like the Tibetan, uses a prayer-wheel … is quite indifferent. As the illusion of thinking that a man can justify himself before God in any way by acts of worship is religious superstition, so the illusion that he can obtain this justification by the so-called intercourse with God is religious mysticism (Schwärmerei). Such superstition leads inevitably to sacerdotalism (Pfaffenthum) which will always be found where the essence is sought not in principles of morality, but in statutory commandments, rules of faith and observances."

"[Religion should be] .... successively freed from all statutes based on history, and one purely moral religion rule over all, in order that God might be all in all. The veil must fall. The leading-string of sacred tradition with all its appendices becomes by degrees useless, and at last a fetter … The humiliating difference between laymen and clergymen must disappear, and equality spring from true liberty. All this, however, must not be expected from an exterior revolution, which acts violently, and depends upon fortune In the principle of pure moral religion, which is a sort of divine revelation constantly taking place in the soul of man, must be sought the ground for a passage to the new order of things, which will be accomplished by slow and successive reforms."

"Have patience awhile; slanders are not long-lived. Truth is the child of time; erelong she shall appear to vindicate thee."

"The death of dogma is the birth of morality."

"By a lie a man throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man. A man who himself does not believe what he tells another … has even less worth than if he were a mere thing. … makes himself a mere deceptive appearance of man, not man himself."

"Tibet... this is the highest country. No doubt it was inhabited before any other and could even have been the site of all creation and all science. The culture of the Indians, as is known is almost certainly came from Tibet, just as all our arts like agriculture, numbers, the game of chess, etc., seem to have come from India."

"I come now to another part of my system, and because it suggests a lofty idea of the plan of creation, it appears to me as the most seductive. The sequence of ideas that led us to it is very simple and natural. They are as follows: let us imagine a system of stars gathered together in a common plane, like those of the Milky Way, but situated so far away from us that even with the telescope we cannot distinguish the stars composing it; let us assume that its distance, compared to that separating us from the stars of the Milky Way, is the same proportion as the Milky Way is to the distance from the earth to the sun; such a stellar world will appear to the observer, who contemplates it at so enormous a distance, only as a little spot feebly illumined and subtending a very small angle; its shape will be circular, if its plane is perpendicular to the line of sight, elliptical, if it is seen obliquely. The faintness of its light, its form, and its appreciable diameter will obviously distinguish such a phenomenon from the isolated stars around it. We do not need to seek far in the observations of astronomers to meet with such phenomena. They have been seen by various observers, who have wondered at their strange appearance, have speculated about them, and have suggested some times the most amazing explanations, sometimes theories which were more rational, but which had no more foundation than the former. We refer to the nebulæ, or, more precisely, to a particular kind of celestial body which M. de Maupertius describes as follows: "These are small luminous patches, only slightly more brilliant than the dark background of the sky; they have this in common, that their shapes are more or less open elipses; and their light is far more feeble than that of any other objects to be perceived in the heavens." ...It is much more natural and reasonable to assume that a nebula is not a unique and solitary sun, but a system of numerous suns, which appear crowded, because of their distance, into a space so limited that their light, which would be imperceptible were each of them isolated, suffices, owing to their enormous numbers, to give a pale and uniform luster. Their analogy with our own system of stars; their form, which is precisely what it should be according to our theory; the faintness of their light, which denotes an infinite distance; all are in admirable accord and lead us to consider these elliptical spots as systems of the same order as our own—in a word, to be Milky Ways similar to the one whose constitution we have explained. And if these hypotheses, in which analogy and observation consistently lend mutual support, have the same merit as formal demonstrations, we must consider the existence of such systems as demonstrated... We see that scattered through space out to infinite distances, there exist similar systems of stars [nebulous stars, nebulæ], and that creation, in the whole extent of its infinite grandeur, is everywhere organized into systems whose members are in relation with one another.... A vast field lies open to discoveries, and observations alone will give the key."

"As the analysis of a substantial composite terminates only in a part which is not a whole, that is, in a simple part, so synthesis terminates only in a whole which is not a part, that is, the world."

"The mind intent upon resolving as well as compounding the concept of a composite demands and presumes boundaries in which it may acquiesce in the former as well as in the latter direction."

"The force of the word World, as commonly used, of itself falls in with us. For no one will attribute accidents to the World as parts, but as determinations, states; hence the so-called world of the ego, unrestrained by the single substance and its accidents, is not very appositely called a World, unless, perhaps, an imaginary one."

"Percepts and phenomena which precedes the logical use of the intellect is called appearance, while the reflex knowledge originating from several appearances compared by the intellect is called experience."

"an intellectual concept abstracts from everything sensuous, it is not abstracted from sensuous things, and perhaps would be more correctly called abstracting than abstract. Intellectual concepts it is more cautious, therefore, to call pure ideas, and concepts given only empirically, abstract ideas."

"The sensuous may be exceedingly distinct, while intellectual concepts are extremely confused. The former we observe in the prototype of sensuous knowledge geometry; the latter, in the organon of all intellectual concepts, metaphysics. It is evident how much toil the latter is expending to dispel the fogs of confusion darkening the common intellect, though not always with the happy success of the former science."

"Now the maximum of perfection is called ideal, by Plato, Idea — for instance, his Idea of a Republic — and is the principle of all that is contained under the general notion of any perfection, inasmuch as the lesser grades are not thought determinable but by limiting the maximum. But God, the Ideal of perfection, and hence the principle of cognition, is also, as existing really, the principle of the creation of all perfection."

"Phenomena of the external sense are examined and set forth in physics; those of the internal sense in empirical psychology. Pure mathematics considers space in geometry and time in pure mechanics. To these is to be added a certain concept, intellectual to be sure in itself, but whose becoming actual in the concrete requires the auxiliary notions of time and space in the successive addition and simultaneous juxtaposition of separate units, which is the concept of number treated in arithmetic."

"Let the letters a b c denote the three angular points of a rectilineal triangle. If the point did move continuously over the lines ab, bc, ca, that is, over the perimeter of the figure, it would be necessary for it to move at the point b in the direction ab, and also at the same point b in the direction bc. These motions being diverse, they cannot be simultaneous. There-fore, the moment of presence of the movable point at vertex b, considered as moving in the direction ab, is different from the moment of presence of the movable point at the same vertex b, considered as moving in the same direction bc. But between two moments there is time; therefore, the movable point is present at point b for some time, that is, it rests. Therefore it does not move continuously, which is contrary to the assumption. The same demonstration is valid for motion over any right lines including an assignable angle. Hence a body does not change its direction in continuous motion except by following a line no part of which is straight, that is, a curve, as Leibnitz maintained."

"Those who assert the objective reality of time either conceive of it as a continuous flow in what exists, without, however, any existing thing, as is done especially by the English philosophers, an absurd fiction, or as something real abstracted from the succession of inner states, as it has been put by Leibnitz and his followers."

"It is absurd to excite reason against the primary postulates of pure time, as, for example, continuity, etc., since they follow from laws prior and superior to which nothing is found, and since reason herself in the use of the principle of contradiction cannot dispense with the support of this concept, so primitive and original is it."

"The concept of space is not abstracted from external sensations."

"The concept of space, therefore, is a pure intuition, being a singular concept, not made up by sensations, but itself the fundamental form of all external sensation."

"Nature, therefore, is subject with absolute precision to all the precepts of geometry as to all the properties of space there demonstrated, this being the subjective condition, not hypothetically but intuitively given, of every phenomenon in which nature can ever be revealed to the senses."

"Space is employed as the type even of the concept of time itself, representing it by a line, and its limits — moments — by points. Time, on the other had, approaches more to a universal and rational concept, comprising under its relations all things whatsoever, to wit, space itself, and besides, those accidents which are not comprehended in the relations of space, such as the thoughts of the soul. Again, time, besides this, though it certainly does not dictate the laws of reason, yet constitutes the principal conditions tinder favor of which the mind compares its notions according to the laws of reason. Thus, I cannot judge what is impossible except by predicating a and not-a of the same subject at the same time."

"The question of the principle of the form of the intelligible world turns, therefore, upon making apparent in what manner it is possible for several substances to be in mutual commerce, and for this reason to pertain to the same whole, which is called world. We do not here consider the world, let it be understood, as to matter, that is, as to the nature of the substances of which it consists, whether they be material or immaterial, but as to form, that is to say, how among several things taken separately a connection, and among them all, totality can have place."

"The sham cause in physical influence consists in rashly assuming that the commerce of substance and transitive forces is sufficiently knowable from their mere existence. Hence it is not so much a system as rather the neglect of all philosophical system as a superfluity in the argument. Freeing the concept from this defect, we shall have a species of commerce alone deserving to be called real, and from which the whole constituting the world merits being called real, and not ideal or imaginary."

"A whole from necessary substances is impossible. The whole, therefore, of substances is a whole of contingent things, and the world consists essentially of only contingent things."

"Several actual worlds without one another are not, therefore, impossible by the very concept, as Wolf hastily concluded from the notion of a complex or multiplicity which he deemed sufficient to a whole, as such, but only on condition that there exist but one necessary cause of all things. If several are admitted, several worlds without one another will be possible in the strictest metaphysical sense."

"If it were right to overstep a little the limits of apodictic certainty befitting metaphysics, it would seem worth while to trace out some things pertaining not merely to the laws but even to the causes of sensuous intuition, which are only intellectually knowable. Of course the human mind is not affected by external things, and the world does not lie open to its insight infinitely, except as far as itself together with all other things is sustained by the same infinite power of one. Hence it does not perceive external things but by the presence of the same common sustaining cause; and hence space, which is the universal and necessary condition of the joint presence of everything known sensuously, may be called the phenomenal omnipresence, for the cause of the universe is not present to all things and everything, as being in their places, but their places, that is the relations of the substances, are possible, because it is intimately present to all. Furthermore, since the possibility of the changes and successions of all things whose principle as far as sensuously known resides in the concept of time, supposes the continuous existence of the subject whose opposite states succeed; that whose states are in flux, lasting not, however, unless sustained by another; the concept of time as one infinite and immutable in which all things are and last, is the phenomenal eternity of the general cause} But it seems more cautious to hug the shore of the cognitions granted to us by the mediocrity of our intellect than to be carried out upon the high seas of such mystic investigations, like Malebranche, whose opinion that we see all things in God is pretty nearly what has here been expounded."

"The use of the intellect in the sciences whose primitive concepts as well as axioms are given by sensuous intuition is only logical, that is, by it we only subordinate cognitions to one another according to their relative universality conformably to the principle of contradiction, phenomena to more general phenomena, and consequences of pure intuition to intuitive axioms. But in pure philosophy, such as metaphysics, in which the use of the intellect in respect to principles is real, that is to say, where the primary concept of things and relations and the very axioms are given originally by the pure intellect itself, and not being intuitions do not enjoy immunity from error, the method precedes the whole science, and whatever is attempted before its precepts are thoroughly discussed and firmly established is looked upon as rashly conceived and to be rejected among vain instances of mental playfulness."

"The method of the science not being practiced much nowadays, except what logic prescribes to all sciences generally, that fitted for the peculiar nature of metaphysics being simply ignored, it is no wonder that those who everlastingly turn the Sisyphean stone of this inquiry do not seem so far to have made much progress. Though here I neither can nor will expatiate upon so important and extensive a subject, I shall briefly shadow forth what constitutes no despicable part of this method, namely, the infection between sensuous and intellectual cognition, not only as creeping in on those incautious in the application of principles, but even producing spurious principles under the appearance of axioms."

"A spurious axiom of the first class is: Whatever is, is somewhere and sometime."

"they cudgel their brains with absurd questions, such as, for instance, why God did not make the world many centuries earlier. They persuade themselves that it is easy to conceive, to be sure, how God may discern what is present, that is, what is actual in the time in which he is, but how He may foresee what is future, that is, what is actual in the time in which He is not yet, they deem an intellectual difficulty; as if the existence of the Necessary Being descended through all the moments of an imaginary time, and, having already exhausted a part of His duration, saw before Him the eternity He was yet to live simultaneously with the present events of the world. All these difficulties upon proper insight into the notion of time vanish like smoke."

"The prejudices of the second species, since they impose upon the intellect by the sensual conditions restricting the mind if it wishes in certain cases to attain to what is intellectual, lurk more deeply. One of them is that which affects knowledge of quantity, the other that affecting knowledge of qualities generally. The former is: every actual multiplicity can be given numerically, and hence, every infinite quantity; the latter, whatever is impossible contradicts itself. In either of them the concept of time, it is true, does not enter into the very notion of the predicate, nor is it attributed as a qualification to the subject. But yet it serves as a means for forming an idea of the predicate, and thus, being a condition, affects the intellectual concept of the subject to the extent that the latter is only attained by its aid."

"The spurious axioms of the third kind from conditions proper to the subject whence they are transferred rashly to the object are plentiful, not, as in those of the Second Class, because the only way to the intellectual concept lies through the sensuous data, but because only by aid of the latter can the concept be applied to that which is given by experience, that is, can we know whether something is contained under a certain intellectual concept or not. To this class belongs the threadbare one of the schools: whatever exists contingently does at some time not exist. This spurious principle springs from the poverty of the intellect, having insight frequently into the nominal, rarely into the real, marks of contingency or necessity."

"To these spurious principles must be added some others of great affinity with them… First, that by which we assume that everything in the universe is done according to the order of nature, which principle by Epicurus was proclaimed without any restriction, and by all other philosophers unanimously with extremely rare exceptions, not to be admitted but from supreme necessity."

"The second is the partiality for unity proper to the philosophical mind, whence this wide-spread canon has flown forth: principles are not to be multiplied beyond supreme necessity, to which we give in our adhesion, not because we have insight into causal unity in the world either by reason or experience, but as seeking it by an impulse of the intellect which seems to itself to have by thus much advanced in the explication of phenomena, by as much as it is granted to it to descend from the same principle to a greater number of consequences,"

"The third of this kind of principles is : matter neither originates nor perishes; all the changes in the world concern form only ; a postulate which on the recommendation of common sense has spread through all philosophical schools, not because it is to be taken as having been found so, or as having been demonstrated by arguments a priori, but because if we were to admit that matter itself is fleeting and transitory, nothing at all that is stable and lasting would be left any longer to serve for the explication of phenomena according to universal and perpetual laws, and hence nothing at all would be left for the exercise of the intellect."

"I freely admit that the remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my researches in the field of speculative philosophy."

"Es ist so bequem, unmündig zu sein. Habe ich ein Buch, das für mich Verstand hat, einen Seelsorger, der für mich Gewissen hat, einen Arzt, der für mich die Diät beurtheilt u. s. w., so brauche ich mich ja nicht selbst zu bemühen. Ich habe nicht nöthig zu denken, wenn ich nur bezahlen kann."

"Through laziness and cowardice a large part of mankind, even after nature has freed them from alien guidance, gladly remain immature. It is because of laziness and cowardice that it is so easy for others to usurp the role of guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor!"

"The guardians who have kindly undertaken the supervision will see to it that by far the largest part of mankind, including the entire "beautiful sex," should consider the step into maturity, not only as difficult but as very dangerous. After having made their domestic animals dumb and having carefully prevented these quiet creatures from daring to take any step beyond the lead-strings to which they have fastened them, these guardians then show them the danger which threatens them, should they attempt to walk alone."

"It is difficult for the isolated individual to work himself out of the immaturity which has become almost natural for him. He has even become fond of it and for the time being is incapable of employing his own intelligence, because he has never been allowed to make the attempt. Statutes and formulas, these mechanical tools of a serviceable use, or rather misuse, of his natural faculties, are the ankle-chains of a continuous immaturity. Whoever threw it off would make an uncertain jump over the smallest trench because he is not accustomed to such free movement. Therefore there are only a few who have pursued a firm path and have succeeded in escaping from immaturity by their own cultivation of the mind."

"There will always be some people who think for themselves, even among the self-appointed guardians of the great mass who, after having thrown off the yoke of immaturity themselves, will spread about them the spirit of a reasonable estimate of their own value and of the need for every man to think for himself."

"A public can only arrive at enlightenment slowly. Through revolution, the abandonment of personal despotism may be engendered and the end of profit-seeking and domineering oppression may occur, but never a true reform of the state of mind. Instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones, will serve as the guiding reins of the great, unthinking mass. All that is required for this enlightenment is freedom; and particularly the least harmful of all that may be called freedom, namely, the freedom for man to make public use of his reason in all matters. But I hear people clamor on all sides: Don't argue! The officer says: Don't argue, drill! The tax collector: Don't argue, pay! The pastor: Don't argue, believe!"

"The public use of a man's reason must be free at all times, and this alone can bring enlightenment among men..."

"Whatever concept one may hold, from a metaphysical point of view, concerning the freedom of the will, certainly its appearances, which are human actions, like every other natural event are determined by universal laws. However obscure their causes, history, which is concerned with narrating these appearances, permits us to hope that if we attend to the play of freedom of the human will in the large, we may be able to discern a regular movement in it, and that what seems complex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint of the human race as a whole to be a steady and progressive though slow evolution of its original endowment."

"Since men in their endeavors behave, on the whole, not just instinctively, like the brutes, nor yet like rational citizens of the world according to some agreed-on plan, no history of man conceived according to a plan seems to be possible, as it might be possible to have such a history of bees or beavers. One cannot suppress a certain indignation when one sees men’s actions on the great world-stage and finds, beside the wisdom that appears here and there among individuals, everything in the large woven together from folly, childish vanity, even from childish malice and destructiveness. In the end, one does not know what to think of the human race, so conceited in its gifts."

"All natural capacities of a creature are destined to evolve completely to their natural end."

"In man (as the only rational creature on earth) those natural capacities which are directed to the use of his reason are to be fully developed only in the race, not in the individual."

"Reason in a creature is a faculty of widening the rules and purposes of the use of all its powers far beyond natural instinct; it acknowledges no limits to its projects. Reason itself does not work instinctively, but requires trial, practice, and instruction in order gradually to progress from one level of insight to another. Therefore a single man would have to live excessively long in order to learn to make full use of all his natural capacities. Since Nature has set only a short period for his life, she needs a perhaps unreckonable series of generations, each of which passes its own enlightenment to its successor in order finally to bring the seeds of enlightenment to that degree of development in our race which is completely suitable to Nature’s purpose. This point of time must be, at least as an ideal, the goal of man’s efforts, for otherwise his natural capacities would have to be counted as for the most part vain and aimless. This would destroy all practical principles, and Nature, whose wisdom must serve as the fundamental principle in judging all her other offspring, would thereby make man alone a contemptible plaything."

"Nature has willed that man should, by himself, produce everything that goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence, and that he should partake of no other happiness or perfection than that which he himself, independently of instinct, has created by his own reason."

"Nature does nothing in vain, and in the use of means to her goals she is not prodigal. Her giving to man reason and the freedom of the will which depends upon it is clear indication of her purpose. Man accordingly was not to be guided by instinct, not nurtured and instructed with ready-made knowledge; rather, he should bring forth everything out of his own resources."

"The means employed by Nature to bring about the development of all the capacities of men is their antagonism in society, so far as this is, in the end, the cause of a lawful order among men."

"The greatest problem for the human race, to the solution of which Nature drives man, is the achievement of a universal civic society which administers law among men."

"This problem is the most difficult and the last to be solved by mankind."

"The master is himself an animal, and needs a master. Let him begin it as he will, it is not to be seen how he can procure a magistracy which can maintain public justice and which is itself just, whether it be a single person or a group of several elected persons. For each of them will always abuse his freedom if he has none above him to exercise force in accord with the laws. The highest master should be just in himself, and yet a man. This task is therefore the hardest of all; indeed, its complete solution is impossible, for from such crooked wood as man is made of, nothing perfectly straight can be built. That it is the last problem to be solved follows also from this: it requires that there be a correct conception of a possible constitution, great experience gained in many paths of life, and — far beyond these — a good will ready to accept such a constitution. Three such things are very hard, and if they are ever to be found together, it will be very late and after many vain attempts."

"The problem of establishing a perfect civic constitution is dependent upon the problem of a lawful external relation among states and cannot be solved without a solution of the latter problem."

"What is the use of working toward a lawful civic constitution among individuals, i.e., toward the creation of a commonwealth? The same unsociability which drives man to this causes any single commonwealth to stand in unrestricted freedom in relation to others; consequently, each of them must expect from another precisely the evil which oppressed the individuals and forced them to enter into a lawful civic state. The friction among men, the inevitable antagonism, which is a mark of even the largest societies and political bodies, is used by Nature as a means to establish a condition of quiet and security. Through war, through the taxing and never-ending accumulation of armament, through the want which any state, even in peacetime, must suffer internally, Nature forces them to make at first inadequate and tentative attempts; finally, after devastations, revolutions, and even complete exhaustion, she brings them to that which reason could have told them at the beginning and with far less sad experience, to wit, to step from the lawless condition of savages into a league of nations. In a league of nations, even the smallest state could expect security and justice, not from its own power and by its own decrees, but only from this great league of nations … from a united power acting according to decisions reached under the laws of their united will."

"All wars are accordingly so many attempts (not in the intention of man, but in the intention of Nature) to establish new relations among states, and through the destruction or at least the dismemberment of all of them to create new political bodies, which, again, either internally or externally, cannot maintain themselves and which must thus suffer like revolutions; until finally, through the best possible civic constitution and common agreement and legislation in external affairs, a state is created which, like a civic commonwealth, can maintain itself automatically."

"Is it reasonable to assume a purposiveness in all the parts of nature and to deny it to the whole?"

"To a high degree we are, through art and science, cultured. We are civilized — perhaps too much for our own good — in all sorts of social grace and decorum. But to consider ourselves as having reached morality — for that, much is lacking. The ideal of morality belongs to culture; its use for some simulacrum of morality in the love of honor and outward decorum constitutes mere civilization. So long as states waste their forces in vain and violent self-expansion, and thereby constantly thwart the slow efforts to improve the minds of their citizens by even withdrawing all support from them, nothing in the way of a moral order is to be expected. For such an end, a long internal working of each political body toward the education of its citizens is required. Everything good that is not based on a morally good disposition, however, is nothing but pretense and glittering misery. In such a condition the human species will no doubt remain until, in the way I have described, it works its way out of the chaotic conditions of its international relations."

"The history of mankind can be seen, in the large, as the realization of Nature’s secret plan to bring forth a perfectly constituted state as the only condition in which the capacities of mankind can be fully developed, and also bring forth that external relation among states which is perfectly adequate to this end."

"Everyone can see that philosophy can have her belief in a millennium, but her millennarianism is not Utopian, since the Idea can help, though only from afar, to bring the millennium to pass. The only question is: Does Nature reveal anything of a path to this end? And I say: She reveals something, but very little. This great revolution seems to require so long for its completion that the short period during which humanity has been following this course permits us to determine its path and the relation of the parts to the whole with as little certainty as we can determine, from all previous astronomical observation, the path of the sun and his host of satellites among the fixed stars. Yet, on the fundamental premise of the systematic structure of the cosmos and from the little that has been observed, we can confidently infer the reality of such a revolution. Moreover, human nature is so constituted that we cannot be indifferent to the most remote epoch our race may come to, if only we may expect it with certainty. Such indifference is even less possible for us, since it seems that our own intelligent action may hasten this happy time for our posterity. For that reason, even faint indications of approach to it are very important to us."

"A philosophical attempt to work out a universal history according to a natural plan directed to achieving the civic union of the human race must be regarded as possible and, indeed, as contributing to this end of Nature."

"A metaphysics of morals is therefore indispensably necessary, not merely because of a motive to speculation — for investigating the source of the practical basic principles that lie a priori in our reason — but also because morals themselves remain subject to all sorts of corruption as long as we are without that clue and supreme norm by which to appraise them correctly..."

"Es ist überall nichts in der Welt, ja überhaupt auch außer derselben zu denken möglich, was ohne Einschränkung für gut könnte gehalten werden, als allein ein guter Wille."

"Ich soll niemals anders verfahren als so, dass ich auch wollen könne, meine Maxime solle ein allgemeines Gesetz werden."

"I do not, therefore, need any penetrating acuteness to see what I have to do in order that my volition be morally good. Inexperienced in the course of the world, incapable of being prepared for whatever might come to pass in it, I ask myself only: can you also will that your maxim become a universal law?"

"Even if there never have been actions arising from such pure sources, what is at issue here is not whether this or that happened; that, instead, reason by itself and independently of all appearances commands what ought to happen; that, accordingly, actions of which the world has perhaps so far given no example, and whose very practicability might be very much doubted by one who bases everything on experience, are still inflexibly commanded by reason … because … duty … lies, prior to all experience, in the idea of a reason determing the will by means of apriori grounds."

"Morality is thus the relation of actions to the autonomy of the will, that is, to a possible giving of universal law through its maxims. An action that can coexist with the autonomy of the will is permitted; one that does not accord with it is forbidden. A will whose maxims necessarily harmonize with the laws of autonomy is a holy, absolutely good will. The dependence upon the principle of autonomy of a will that is not absolutely good (moral necessitation) is obligation. This, accordingly, cannot be attributed to a holy being. The objective of an action from obligation is called duty."

"... happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination, resting on merely empirical grounds,"

"Handle so, daß du die Menschheit, sowol in deiner Person, als in der Person eines jeden andern, jederzeit zugleich als Zweck, niemals bloß als Mittel brauchest."

"Im Reiche der Zwecke hat alles entweder einen Preis oder eine Würde. Was einen Preis hat, an dessen Stelle kann auch etwas anderes als Äquivalent gesetzt werden; was dagegen über allen Preis erhaben ist, mithin kein Äquivalent verstattet, das hat eine Würde."

"Die menschliche Vernunft hat hier, wie allerwärts in ihrem reinen Gebrauche, so lange es ihr an Kritik fehlt, vorher alle mögliche unrechte Wege versucht, ehe es ihr gelingt, den einzigen wahren zu treffen."

"I maintain that in every special natural doctrine only so much science proper is to be met with as mathematics; for... science proper, especially of nature, requires a pure portion, lying at the foundation of the empirical, and based upon à priori knowledge of natural things. ...the conception should be constructed. But the cognition of the reason through construction of conceptions is mathematical. A pure philosophy of nature in general, namely, one that only investigates what constitutes a nature in general, may thus be possible without mathematics; but a pure doctrine of nature respecting determinate natural things (corporeal doctrine and mental doctrine), is only possible by means of mathematics; and as in every natural doctrine only so much science proper is to be met with therein as there is cognition à priori, a doctrine of nature can only contain so much science proper as there is in it of applied mathematics."

"All natural philosophers, who wished to proceed mathematically in their work, have hence invariably (although unknown to themselves) made use of metaphysical principles, and must make use of such, it matters not how energetically they may otherwise repudiate any claim of metaphysics on their science."

"All true metaphysics is taken from the essential nature of the thinking faculty itself, and therefore in nowise invented, since it is not borrowed from experience, but contains the pure operations of thought, that is, conceptions and principles à priori, which the manifold of empirical presentations first of all brings into legitimate connection, by which it can become empirical knowledge, i.e. experience. ...mathematical physicists were thus quite unable to dispense with such metaphysical principles..."

"Natural science is throughout either a pure or an applied doctrine of motion."

"I have in this treatise followed the mathematical method, if not with all strictness, at least imitatively, not in order, by a display of profundity, to procure a better reception for it, but because I believe such a system to be quite capable of it, and that perfection may in time be obtained by a cleverer hand, if stimulated by this sketch, mathematical investigators of nature should find it not unimportant to treat the metaphysical portion, which anyway cannot be got rid of, as a special fundamental department of general physics, and to bring it into unison with the mathematical doctrine of motion."

"Newton... (after having remarked that geometry only requires two of the mechanical actions which it postulates, namely, to describe a straight line and a circle) says: geometry is proud of being able to achieve so much while taking so little from extraneous sources. One might say of metaphysics, on the other hand: it stands astonished, that with so much offered it by pure mathematics it can effect so little. In the meantime, this little is something which mathematics indispensably requires in its application to natural science, which, inasmuch as it must here necessarily borrow from metaphysics, need not be ashamed to allow itself to be seen in company with the latter."

"Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer."

"Mathematics, from the earliest times to which the history of human reason can reach, has followed, among that wonderful people of the Greeks, the safe way of science. But it must not be supposed that it was as easy for mathematics as for logic, in which reason is concerned with itself alone, to find, or rather to make for itself that royal road. I believe, on the contrary, that there was a long period of tentative work (chiefly still among the Egyptians), and that the change is to be ascribed to a revolution, produced by the happy thought of a single man, whose experiments pointed unmistakably to the path that had to be followed, and opened and traced out for the most distant times the safe way of a science. The history of that intellectual revolution, which was far more important than the passage round the celebrated Cape of Good Hope, and the name of its fortunate author, have not been preserved to us. ... A new light flashed on the first man who demonstrated the properties of the isosceles triangle (whether his name was Thales or any other name), for he found that he had not to investigate what he saw hi the figure, or the mere concepts of that figure, and thus to learn its properties; but that he had to produce (by construction) what he had himself, according to concepts a priori, placed into that figure and represented in it, so that, in order to know anything with certainty a priori, he must not attribute to that figure anything beyond what necessarily follows from what he has himself placed into it, in accordance with the concept."

"Abbot Terrasson tells us that if the size of a book were measured not by the number of its pages but by the time required to understand it, then we could say about many books that they would be much shorter were they not so short."

"When Galilei let balls of a particular weight, which he had determined himself, roll down an inclined plain, or Torricelli made the air carry a weight, which he had previously determined to be equal to that of a definite volume of water; or when, in later times, Stahl changed metal into lime, and lime again into metals, by withdrawing and restoring something, a new light flashed on all students of nature. They comprehended that reason has insight into that only, which she herself produces on her own plan, and that she must move forward with the principles of her judgments, according to fixed law, and compel nature to answer her questions, but not let herself be led by nature, as it were in leading strings, because otherwise accidental observations made on no previously fixed plan, will never converge towards a necessary law, which is the only thing that reason seeks and requires. Reason, holding in one hand its principles, according to which concordant phenomena alone can be admitted as laws of nature, and in the other hand the experiment, which it has devised according to those principles, must approach nature, in order to be taught by it: but not in the character of a pupil, who agrees to everything the master likes, but as an appointed judge, who compels the witnesses to answer the questions which he himself proposes. Therefore even the science of physics entirely owes the beneficial revolution in its character to the happy thought, that we ought to seek in nature (and not import into it by means of fiction) whatever reason must learn from nature, and could not know by itself, and that we must do this in accordance with what reason itself has originally placed into nature. Thus only has the study of nature entered on the secure method of a science, after having for many centuries done nothing but grope in the dark."

"I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith."

"Criticism alone can sever the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which can be injurious universally; as well as of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous chiefly to the Schools, and hardly allow of being handed on to the public."

"That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of objects which affect our senses, and partly of them selves produce representations, partly rouse our powers of understanding into activity, to compare, to connect, or to separate these, and so to convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects, which is called experience? In respect of time, therefore, no knowledge of ours is antecedent to experience, but begins with it. But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows, that all arises out of experience. For, on the contrary, it is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we receive through impressions, and that which the faculty of cognition supplies from itself (sensuous impressions giving merely the occasion)... It is, therefore, a question which requires close investigation, and is not to be answered at first sight,—whether there exists a knowledge altogether independent of experience, and even of all sensuous impressions? Knowledge of this kind is called à priori, in contradistinction to empirical knowledge which has its sources à posteriori, that is, in experience."

"The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space."

"All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us."

"Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their unison can knowledge arise."

"Psychologists have hitherto failed to realize that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself."

"I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself."

"All our knowledge falls with the bounds of experience."

"It is therefore correct to say that the senses do not err — not because they always judge rightly, but because they do not judge at all."

"A plant, an animal, the regular order of nature — probably also the disposition of the whole universe — give manifest evidence that they are possible only by means of and according to ideas; that, indeed, no one creature, under the individual conditions of its existence, perfectly harmonizes with the idea of the most perfect of its kind — just as little as man with the idea of humanity, which nevertheless he bears in his soul as the archetypal standard of his actions; that, notwithstanding, these ideas are in the highest sense individually, unchangeably, and completely determined, and are the original causes of things; and that the totality of connected objects in the universe is alone fully adequate to that idea."

"Metaphysics has as the proper object of its enquiries three ideas only: God, freedom, and immortality."

"Human reason is by nature architectonic."

"This proof can at most, therefore, demonstrate the existence of an architect of the world, whose efforts are limited by the capabilities of the material with which he works, but not of a creator of the world, to whom all things are subject."

"All human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to concepts, and ends with ideas."

"Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts; mathematical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts."

"It is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy consists."

"For it is extremely absurd to expect to be enlightened by reason, and yet to prescribe to her beforehand on which side she must incline."

"All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?"

"The inscrutable wisdom through which we exist is not less worthy of veneration in respect to what it denies us than in respect to what it has granted."

"Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."

"Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. I have not to search for them and conjecture them as though they were veiled in darkness or were in the transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before me and connect them directly with the consciousness of my existence. The former begins from the place I occupy in the external world of sense, and enlarges my connection therein to an unbounded extent with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems, and moreover into limitless times of their periodic motion, its beginning and continuance. The second begins from my invisible self, my personality, and exhibits me in a world which has true infinity, but which is traceable only by the understanding, and with which I discern that I am not in a merely contingent but in a universal and necessary connection, as I am also thereby with all those visible worlds. The former view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates as it were my importance as an animal creature, which after it has been for a short time provided with vital power, one knows not how, must again give back the matter of which it was formed to the planet it inhabits (a mere speck in the universe). The second, on the contrary, infinitely elevates my worth as an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the whole sensible world, at least so far as may be inferred from the destination assigned to my existence by this law, a destination not restricted to conditions and limits of this life, but reaching into the infinite."

"Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness."

"it is absurd … to hope that maybe another Newton may some day arise, to make intelligible to us even the genesis of but a blade of grass ("Dialectic of Teleological Judgment" §75)"

"That religion in which I must know in advance that something is a divine command in order to recognize it as my duty, is the revealed religion (or the one standing in need of a revelation); in contrast, that religion in which I must first know that something is my duty before I can accept it as a divine injunction is the natural religion. … When religion is classified not with reference to its first origin and its inner possibility (here it is divided into natural and revealed religion) but with respect to its characteristics which make it capable of being shared widely with others, it can be of two kinds: either the natural religion, of which (once it has arisen) everyone can be convinced through his own reason, or a learned religion, of which one can convince others only through the agency of learning (in and through which they must be guided). … A religion, accordingly, can be natural, and at the same time revealed, when it is so constituted that men could and ought to have discovered it of themselves merely through the use of their reason, although they would not have come upon it so early, or over so wide an area, as is required. Hence a revelation thereof at a given time and in a given place might well be wise and very advantageous to the human race, in that, when once the religion thus introduced is here, and has been made known publicly, everyone can henceforth by himself and with his own reason convince himself of its truth. In this event the religion is objectively a natural religion, though subjectively one that has been revealed."

"There is needed, no doubt, a body of servants (ministerium) of the invisible church, but not officials (officiales), in other words, teachers but not dignitaries, because in the rational religion of every individual there does not yet exist a church as a universal union (omnitudo collectiva)."

"Let us suppose there was a teacher of whom an historical record (or, at least, a widespread belief which is not basically disputable) reports that he was the first to expound publicly a pure and searching religion, comprehensible to the whole world. … Suppose that all he did was done even in the face of a dominant ecclesiastical faith which was onerous and not conducive to moral ends (a faith whose perfunctory worship can serve as a type of all the other faiths, at bottom merely statutory, which were current in the world at the time). Suppose, further, we find that he had made this universal religion of reason the highest and indispensable condition of every religious faith whatsoever … and this without further adding to this faith burdensome new ordinances or wishing to transform acts which he had initiated into peculiar holy practices, required in themselves as being constituent elements of religion. After this description one will not fail to recognize the person who can be referenced, not indeed as the founder of the religion which, free from every dogma, is engraved in all men’s hearts (for it does not have its origin in an arbitrary will), but as the founder of the first true church."

"He [Jesus] claims that not the observance of outer civil or statutory churchly duties but the pure moral disposition of the heart alone can make man well-pleasing to God (Matthew V, 20-48); … that injury done one’s neighbor can be repaired only through satisfaction rendered to the neighbor himself, not through acts of divine worship (V, 24). Thus, he says, does he intend to do full justice to the Jewish law (V, 17); whence it is obvious that not scriptural scholarship but the pure religion of reason must be the law’s interpreter, for taken according to the letter, it allowed the very opposite of all this. Furthermore, he does not leave unnoticed, in his designations of the strait gate and the narrow way, the misconstruction of the law which men allow themselves in order to evade their true moral duty, holding themselves immune through having fulfilled their churchly duty (VII, 13). He further requires of these pure dispositions that they manifest themselves also in works (VII, 16) and, on the other hand, denies the insidious hope of those who imagine that, through invocation and praise of the Supreme Lawgiver in the person of His envoy, they will make up for their lack of good works and ingratiate themselves into favor (VII, 21). Regarding these works he declares that they ought to be performed publicly, as an example for imitation (V, 16), and in a cheerful mood, not as actions extorted from slaves (VI, 16); and that thus, from a small beginning in the sharing and spreading of such dispositions, religion, like a grain of seed in good soil, or a ferment of goodness, would gradually, through its inner power, grow into a kingdom of God (XIII, 31-33)."

"He [Jesus] combines all duties (1) in one universal rule (which includes within itself both the inner and the outer moral relations of men), namely: Perform your duty for no motive other than unconditioned esteem for duty itself, i.e., love God (the Legislator of all duties) above all else; and (2) in a particular rule, that, namely, which concerns man’s external relation to other men as universal duty: Love every one as yourself, i.e., further his welfare from good-will that is immediate and not derived from motives of self-advantage. These commands are not mere laws of virtue but precepts of holiness which we ought to pursue, and the very pursuit of them is called virtue. Accordingly he destroys the hope of all who intend to wait upon this moral goodness quite passively, with their hands in their laps, as though it were a heavenly gift which descends from on high. He who leaves unused the natural predisposition to goodness which lies in human nature (like a talent entrusted to him) in lazy confidence that a higher moral influence will no doubt supply the moral character and completeness which he lacks, is confronted with the threat that even the good which, by virtue of his natural predisposition, he may have done, will not be allowed to stand him in stead because of this neglect (XXV, 29)."

"When the man governed by self-interest, the god of this world, does not renounce it but merely refines it by the use of reason and extends it beyond the constricting boundary of the present, he is represented (Luke XVI, 3-9) as one who, in his very person [as servant], defrauds his master [self- interest] and wins from him sacrifices in behalf of “duty.”"

"Christianity possesses the great advantage over Judaism of being represented as coming from the mouth of the first Teacher not as a statutory but as a moral religion, and as thus entering into the closest relation with reason so that, through reason, it was able of itself, without historical learning, to be spread at all times and among all peoples with the greatest trustworthiness."

"Alles, was ausser dem guten Lebenswandel der Mensch noch thun zu können vermeint, um Gott wohlgefällig zu werden, ist blosser Religionswahn und Afterdienst Gottes."

"Die Verehrung mächtiger unsichtbarer Wesen, welche dem hülflosen Menschen durch die natürliche, auf dem Bewusstsein seines Unvermögens gegründete Furcht abgenöthigt wurde, …"

"Von einem tungusischen Schaman, bis zu dem Kirche und Staat zugleich regierenden europäischen Prälaten … ist zwar ein mächtiger Abstand in der Manier, aber nicht im Prinzip, zu glauben; denn was dieses betrifft, so gehören sie insgesammt zu einer und derselben Klasse, derer nämlich, die in dem, was an sich keinen bessern Menschen ausmacht (im Glauben gewisser statutarischer Sätze, oder Begehen gewisser willkürlicher Observanzen), ihren Gottesdienst setzen. Diejenigen allein, die ihn lediglich in der Gesinnung eines guten Lebenswandels zu finden gemeint sind, unterscheiden sich von jenen durch den Ueberschritt zu einem ganz andern und über das erste weit erhabenen Prinzip."

"The question here is not, “How conscience ought to be guided? For Conscience is its own General and Leader; it is therefore enough that each man have one. What we want to know is, how conscience can be her own Ariadne, and disentangle herself from the mazes even of the most raveled and complicated casuistical theology. Here is an ethical proposition that stands in need of no proof: No Action May At Any Time Be Hazarded On The Uncertainty That Perchance It May Not Be Wrong (Quod dubitas, ne feceris! Pliny - which you doubt, then neither do) Hence the Consciousness, that Any Action I am about to perform is Right, is in itself a most immediate and imperative duty. What actions are right, - what wrong – is a matter for the understanding, not for conscience. p. 251"

"Although individuals who have begun to awake to freedom of cogitation, after having long unconsciously slumbered under the yoke of a belief (e.g. Protestants), do straightway deem themselves ennobled, in proportion to their articles of belief are scanty; yet, singularly enough, they whose understandings still lie dormant, cling to a very different principle of safety. “Better Believe Too Much Than Believe Too Little,” is here the adage; for whatever is done beyond and above what is duty, cannot in any event harm, but may perchance to good. Upon this delusive dream, which would make dishonesty the very spirit and soul of religious confession, is based on the well-known argumentum a tuto, which obtains a more easy and extended currency, because religion compensates for every fault, and hence also for dishonesty in adopting it. If, says the sciolist, what I profess to believe concerning the Godhead is correct, then I have precisely hit the very truth. Should, on the other hand, the articles contain an error, still, as there is nothing in them morally improper, then have I merely assented to something superfluous and unnecessary, by all which I have no doubt molested, but certainly not incriminated myself. The peril arising out of the improbity of his profession – The Lesson of Conscience-necessarily undergone, when what is declared in the presence of God to be certain, which mankind must nevertheless know not to be so constituted as to admit of being affirmed with unconditioned certainty, are all overlooked by this dishonest maxim, And Indeed Pass With The Hypocrite For Nothing. The genuine safety-principle of true religion is contrariwise as follows. Whatever is a mean or condition of future bliss, unknown to naked reason, and promulgated singly by revelation, can strike root in my conviction, just like any other history; and so far forth as it does not militate against morality, cannot be absolutely false. Besides leaving this point totally undecided, I may unquestionably trust, that whatever of salutary there may lie in a document, will stand me in good stead, provided I do not by my moral short-coming make myself unworthy of it. In this maxim, there is a real moral safety, viz. That conscience be not violated; and more cannot be demanded from mankind. There is, moreover, an utmost danger and insecurity in that lauded stratagem of expediency, whereby we think astutely to evade any disadvantageous sequents that may spring from unbelieving nonconformity. Thus tampering with either party, we destroy our credit with both."

"The universal and lasting establishment of peace constitutes not merely a part, but the whole final purpose and end of the science of right as viewed within the limits of reason."

"…sogar daß ihm auch wohl Philosophen, als einer gewissen Veredelung der Menschheit, eine Lobrede halten, uneingedenk des Ausspruchs jenes Griechen: »Der Krieg ist darin schlimm, daß er mehr böse Leute macht, als er deren wegnimmt«."

"Even if a civil society were to be dissolved by the consent of all its members (e.g., if a people inhabiting an island decided to separate and disperse throughout the world), the last murderer remaining in prison would first have to be executed, so that each has done to him what his deeds deserve and blood guilt does not cling to the people for not having insisted upon this punishment; for otherwise the people can be regarded as collaborators in his public violation of justice."

"Der kategorische Imperativ, der überhaupt nur aussagt, was Verbindlichkeit sei, ist: handle nach einer Maxime, welche zugleich als ein allgemeines Gesetz gelten kann."

"Wer sich aber zum Wurm macht, kann nachher nicht klagen, dass er mit Füßen getreten wird."

"Human freedom is realised in the adoption of humanity as an end in itself, for the one thing that no-one can be compelled to do by another is to adopt a particular end."

"Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness."

"For instance, if you have by a lie hindered a man who is even now planning a murder, you are legally responsible for all the consequences. But if you have strictly adhered to the truth, public justice can find no fault with you, be the unforeseen consequence what it may. It is possible that whilst you have honestly answered Yes to the murderer’s question, whether his intended victim is in the house, the latter may have gone out unobserved, and so not have come in the way of the murderer, and the deed therefore have not been done; whereas, if you lied and said he was not in the house, and he had really gone out (though unknown to you) so that the murderer met him as he went, and executed his purpose on him, then you might with justice be accused as the cause of his death. For, if you had spoken the truth as well as you knew it, perhaps the murderer while seeking for his enemy in the house might have been caught by neighbours coming up and the deed been prevented."

"The Palestinians living among us have, for the most part, earned a not unfounded reputation for being cheaters, because of their spirit of usury since their exile. Certainly, it seems strange to conceive of a nation of cheaters; but it is just as odd to think of a nation of merchants, the great majority of whom, bound by an ancient superstition that is recognized by the State they live in, seek no civil dignity and try to make up for this loss by the advantage of duping the people among whom they find refuge, and even one another. The situation could not be otherwise, given a whole nation of merchants, as non-productive members of society (for example, the Jews in Poland)."

"What vexations there are in the external customs which are thought to belong to religion, but which in reality are related to ecclesiastical form! The merits of piety have been set up in such away that the ritual is of no use at all except for the simple submission of the believers to ceremonies and observances, expiations and mortifications (the more the better). But such compulsory services, which are mechanically easy (because no vicious inclination is thus sacrificed), must be found morally very difficult and burdensome to the rational man. When, therefore, the great moral teacher said, 'My commandments are not difficult,' he did not mean that they require only limited exercise of strength in order to be fulfilled. As a matter of fact, as commandments which require pure dispositions of the heart, they are the hardest that can be given. Yet, for a rational man, they are nevertheless infinitely easier to keep than the commandments involving activity which accomplishes nothing... [since] the mechanically easy feels like lifting hundredweights to the rational man when he sees that all the energy spent is wasted."

"Habit... makes the endurance of evil easy (which, under the name of patience, is falsely honored as a virtue), because sensations of the same type, when continued without alteration for a long time, draw our attention away from the senses so that we are scarcely conscious of them at all. On the other hand, habit also makes the consciousness and the remembrance of good that has been received more difficult, which then gradually leads to ingratitude (a real vice). [...] Acquired habit deprives good actions of their moral value because it undermines mental freedom and, moreover, it leads to thoughtless repetitions of the same acts (monotony), and thus becomes ridiculous."

"Collectively, the more civilized men are, the more they are actors. They assume the appearance of attachment, of esteem for others, of modesty, and of disinterestedness, without ever deceiving anyone, because everyone understands that nothing sincere is meant. Persons are familiar with this, and it is even a good thing that this is so in this world, for when men play these roles, virtues are gradually established, whose appearance had up until now only been affected. These virtues ultimately will become part of the actor's disposition. To deceive the deceiver in ourselves, or the tendency to deceive, is a fresh return to obedience[.]"

"Young man! Deny yourself satisfaction (of amusement, of debauchery, of love, etc.), not with the Stoical intention of complete abstinence, but with the refined Epicurean intention of having in view an ever-growing pleasure. This stinginess with the cash of your vital urge makes you definitely richer through the postponement of pleasure, even if you should, for the most part, renounce the indulgence of it until the end of your life. The awareness of having pleasure under your control is, like everything idealistic, more fruitful and more abundant than everything that satisfies the sense through indulgence because it is thereby simultaneously consumed and consequently lost from the aggregate of totality."

"[T]o require that a so-called layman should not use his own reason in religious matters, particularly since religion is to be appreciated as moral, but instead follow the appointed clergyman and thus someone else's reason, is an unjust demand because as to morals every man must account for all his doings. The clergyman will not and even cannot assume such a responsibility."

"The guidelines for achieving wisdom consist of three leading maxims: 1) Think for yourself; 2) (in communication with other people) Put yourself in the place of the other person; 3) Always think by remaining faithful to your own self."

"A mind of slow apprehension is therefore not necessarily a weak mind. The one who is alert with abstractions is not always profound, he is more often very superficial."

"Through failures one becomes intelligent; but the one who has trained himself in this subject so that he can make others wise through their own failures, has used his intelligence. Ignorance is not stupidity."

"The deceiver is really the fool."

"[W]hat alone has value is the use to which life is put and the end to which it is directed. The value of life has to be created by man, it cannot be obtained through luck but only through wisdom. He who is anxiously concerned over losing his life will never enjoy life."

"Money is the password, and all doors, which are closed to the man of lesser means, fly open to those whom Plutus favors. The invention of money, which has no other usefulness (or at least it should not have any) except for the commercial exchange of the products of man's industry, now serves all that is physically good among men. Especially after money was represented by metal, it has produced avarice which, finally, without indulgence, but by its mere possession, and even with the resolution (of the stingy) not to spend it, still contains a power which people believe can sufficiently compensate for the lack of any other power."

"[T]his species works intentionally on its own destruction (by war). This, however, does not keep the rational creatures of such a constantly advancing culture, even in the midst of war, from promising to mankind in coming centuries an unequivocal prospect of bliss which will never end."

"The man of principles has character. Of him we know definitely what to expect. He does not act on the basis of his instinct, but on the basis of his will. Therefore, without being redundant one can classify characteristics according to a person's faculty of desire (what is practical), as a) his nature, or natural talent, b) his temperament, or disposition, and c) his general character, or mode of thinking."

"All... good and useful properties of character have a price in exchange for others which have just as much use. Talent has a market price, since the sovereign or estate-owner can use a talented person in all sorts of ways. Temperament has a fancy price,22 since one can converse well with such a person; he is a pleasant companion. But, character has an inner value[,] and it is above all price."

"Nature made women mature early and had them demand gentle and polite treatment from men, so that they would find themselves imperceptibly fettered by a child due to their own magnanimity; and they would find themselves brought, if not quite to morality itself, then at least to that which cloaks it, moral behavior, which is the preparation and introduction to morality."

"The woman wants to dominate, the man wants to be dominated[.]"

"England and France, the two most civilized nations on earth, who are in contrast to each other because of their different characters, are, perhaps chiefly for that reason, in constant feud with one another. Also, England and France, because of their inborn characters, of which the acquired and artificial character is only the result, are probably the only nations who can be assumed to have a particular and, as long as both national characters are not blended by the force of war, unalterable characteristics. That French has become the universal language of conversation, especially in the feminine world, and that English is the most widely used language of commerce among tradesmen, probably reflects the difference in their continental and insular geographic situation."

"[T]he first characteristic of the human species is man's ability, as a rational being, to establish character for himself, as well as for the society into which nature has placed him. This ability, however, presupposes an already favorable natural predisposition and an inclination to the good in man, because the evil is really without character (since it is at odds with itself, and since it does not tolerate any lasting principle within itself)"

"If you punish a child for being naughty, and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and finds that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds either of advantage to himself."

"The child must be brought up free (that he allow others to be free). He must learn to endure the restraint to which freedom subjects itself for its own preservation (experience no subordination to his command). Thus he must be disciplined. This precedes instruction. Training must continue without interruption. He must learn to do without things and to be cheerful about it. He must not be obliged to dissimulate, he must acquire immediate horror of lies, must learn so to respect the rights of men that they become an insurmountable wall for him. His instruction must be more negative. He must not learn religion before he knows morality. He must be refined, but not spoiled (pampered). He must learn to speak frankly, and must assume no false shame. Before adolescence he must not learn fine manners ; thoroughness is the chief thing. Thus he is crude longer, but earlier useful and capable."

"Good and strong will. Mechanism must precede science (learning). Also in morals and religion? Too much discipline makes one narrow and kills proficiency. Politeness belongs, not to discipline, but to polish, and thus comes last."

"There must be a seed of every good thing in the character of men, otherwise no one can bring it out. Lacking that, analogous motives, honor, etc., are substituted. Parents are in the habit of looking out for the inclinations, for the talents and dexterity, perhaps for the disposition of their children, and not at all for their heart or character."

"Character means that the person derives his rules of conduct from himself and from the dignity of humanity. Character is the common ruling principle in man in the use of his talents and attributes. Thus it is the nature of his will, and is good or bad. A man who acts without settled principles, with no uniformity, has no character. A man may have a good heart and yet no character, because he is dependent upon impulses and does not act according to maxims. Firmness and unity of principle are essential to character."

"The more one presupposes that his own power will suffice him to realize what he desires the more practical is that desire. When I treat a man contemptuously, I can inspire him with no practical desire to appreciate my grounds of truth. When I treat any one as worthless, I can inspire him with no desire to do right."

"The evil effect of science upon men is principally this, that by far the greatest number of those who wish to display a knowledge of it accomplish no improvement at all of the understanding, but only a perversity of it, not to mention that it serves most of them as a tool of vanity."

"Man's greatest concern is to know how he shall properly fill his place in the universe and correctly understand what he must be in order to be a man."

"I am an investigator by inclination. I feel a great thirst for knowledge and an impatient eagerness to advance, also satisfaction at each progressive step. There was a time when I thought that all this could constitute the honor of humanity, and I despised the mob, which knows nothing about it. Rousseau set me straight. This dazzling excellence vanishes; I learn to honor men, and would consider myself much less useful than common laborers if I did not believe that this consideration could give all the others a value, to establish the rights of humanity."

"In the metaphysical elements of aesthetics the various nonmoral feelings are to be made use of; in the elements of moral metaphysics the various moral feelings of men, according to the differences in sex, age, education, and government, of races and climates, are to be employed."

"In the natural state no concept of God can arise, and the false one which one makes for himself is harmful. Hence the theory of natural religion can be true only where there is no science; therefore it cannot bind all men together."

"Man has his own inclinations and a natural will which, in his actions, by means of his free choice, he follows and directs. There can be nothing more dreadful than that the actions of one man should be subject to the will of another; hence no abhorrence can be more natural than that which a man has for slavery. And it is for this reason that a child cries and becomes embittered when he must do what others wish, when no one has taken the trouble to make it agreeable to him. He wants to be a man soon, so that he can do as he himself likes."

"Suicide evokes revulsion with horror, because everything in nature seeks to preserve itself: a damaged tree, a living body, an animal; and in man, then, is freedom, which is the highest degree of life, and constitutes the worth of it, to become now a principium for self-destruction? This is the most horrifying thing imaginable. For anyone who has already got so far as to be master, at any time, over his own life, is also master over the life of anyone else; for him, the door stands open to every crime, and before he can be seized he is ready to spirit himself away out of the world. So suicide evokes horror, in that a man thereby puts himself below the beasts. We regard a suicide as a carcase, whereas we feel pity for one who meets his end through fate."

"A person who already displays … cruelty to animals is also no less hardened towards men. We can already know the human heart, even in regard to animals."

"The more we devote ourselves to observing animals and their behaviour, the more we love them, on seeing how gready they care for their young; in such a context, we cannot even contemplate cruelty to a wolf. Leibnitz put the grub he had been observing back on the tree with its leaf, lest he should be guilty of doing any harm to it. It upsets a man to destroy such a creature for no reason, and this tenderness is subsequently transferred to man."

"Thus our duties to animals are indirectly duties to humanity."

"Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play."

"Do what is right, though the world may perish."

"To be is to do."

"If the truth shall kill them, let them die."

"The slow progress towards juster international relations may be traced to the distinguished jurist of the Netherlands, Grotius; to the great German, Immanuel Kant, who lifted the subject of “Eternal Peace’ high above controversy; to Count Tolstoy of Russia, who so trenchantly set it forth in our own day, and so on throughout the nations."

"If ... the ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to "demand" its exercise from every sane person, no matter how erudite or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be. Kant—in this respect almost alone among the philosophers—was much bothered by the common opinion that philosophy is only for the few, precisely because of its moral implications."

"The innocent sounding First Thesis, taken seriously, forces us to move our attention away from the individual toward humanity. Since there are no limits to the application of reason, and reason does not work instinctively, but requires "trial, practice, and instruction in order to gradually progress from one level of insight to another," individual human beings do not live long enough to learn the full use of reason. However, we find nature setting a short period for individual lives, but producing a series of generations in which each passes its own accomplishments onto its successor. The only way to make the capability of reasoning consistent with the First Thesis is to assume that rationality is to be fully developed only in the race, not in the individual."

"The new will prove to be a critical philosophy more subtle and more synthetic than was Kantian philosophy in respect to Newtonian science. Relativistic criticism does not limit itself to a revolution of means of explanation. It is more profoundly revolutionary. It is more génial."

"For it is only in the Critique that all the various strands of Kant's thought are woven together into the pattern of his practical philosophy. This pattern, in turn, can be understood only in the entire fabric of the critical philosophy, and that rich design can be clear only to those who have understood each of its three principal parts, which are the three Critiques and not shorter and more popular works like the Prolegomena and the Foundations."

"Through Kant’s philosophical works, the concept of criticism took on an almost magical meaning for the younger generation [of Germans in the Romantic movement]. To be critical meant to raise thought so far above all constraint that, through the perception of the falseness of constraints, knowledge of the truth takes flight as if by magic."

"Clearness and vividness in writing often turn on mere specificity. To say that Major André was hanged is clear and definite; to say that he as killed is less definite, because you do not know in what way he was killed; to say that he died is still more indefinite because you do not even know whether his death was due to violence or to natural causes. If we were to use this statement as a varying symbol by which to rank writers for clearness, we might, I think, get something like the following: Swift, Macauley, and Shaw would say that André was hanged. Bradley would say that he was killed. Bosanquet would say that he died. Kant would say that his mortal existence achieved its termination. Hegel would say that a finite determination of infinity had been further determined by its own negation."

"Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, James, Bergson all are united in one earnest attempt, the attempt to reinstate man with his high spiritual claims in a place of importance in the cosmic scheme."

"An idealist, Kant separated the phenomenal world from a world of "things in themselves." He believed that science could offer only mechanical explanations, but he affirmed that in areas where such explanations were inadequate, scientific knowledge needed to be supplemented by considering nature as being purposeful."

"We cannot assert with Kant that the propositions of Euclidean geometry possess any universal truth even when restricting ourselves to this particular world in which we live."

"Kant's attitude toward Newton's absolute space is somewhat confused. At times he defends the absoluteness... At other times he presents his own arguments in favor of the relativity of space and motion. ...At any rate the problem of the absoluteness of space and time in classical science refers not to the essence of space and time ( a problem which would degenerate into one of metaphysics, hence would be meaningless to the scientists), but solely to a discussion of those conceptions which are demanded of the world of experience. Hence we may realise that a man ignorant of mechanics is in no position to pass an opinion one way or the other. And Kant's knowledge of Newtonian mechanics was extremely poor, to say the least. Thus in his Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels [General History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens], we find him giving incorrect formulæ for the most elementary facts concerning falling bodies. Then again, basing his arguments on what he claims to be the laws of dynamics, he tells us of a nebula which would set itself into rotation owing to its outer parts falling towards the centre and rebounding sideways against the inner parts. But this hypothesis is in flagrant opposition to the principles of dynamics, and had Kant spoken of a man pulling himself up by the bootstraps he would have given expression to no greater absurdity. Whereas this latter statement would violate the principle of action and reaction, Kant's violates the principle of the constancy of the angular momentum of an isolated dynamical system."

"Kant does in fact suggest that some cultures may be more adept than others at teaching their members to use the freedom that is their natural gift. But the social and political spheres can have nothing to do with the giving of this gift in the first place. Kant writes that in the social and political spheres, the goal is to balance competing inclinations through a system of competing coercions; the effect of society and politics on individuals is therefore entirely heteronomous."

"The great achievement of Kant is to have shown, once for all, that the external world is known to us only as sensation; and that the mind is no mere helpless tabula rasa, the inactive victim of sensation, but a positive agent, selecting and reconstructing experience as experience arrives. We can make subtractions from this accomplishment without injuring its essential greatness… There is something of a severe Scotch Calvinism in this opposition of duty to happiness; Kant continues Luther and the Stoic Reformation:, as Voltaire continues Montaigne and·the Epicurean Renaissance. He represented a stern reaction against the egoism and hedonism in which Helvetius and Holbach had formulated the life of their reckless era, very much as Luther had reacted against the luxury and laxity of Mediterranean Italy. But after a century of reaction against the absolutism of Kant’s ethics, we find ourselves again in a welter of urban sensualism and immorality, of ruthless individualism untempered with democratic conscience or aristocratic honor; and perhaps the day will soon come when a disintegrating civilization will welcome again the Kantian call to duty… After a century of struggle between the idealism of Kant, variously reformed, and the materialism of the Enlightenment, variously redressed, the victory seems to lie with Kant. Philosophy will never again be so naive as in her earlier and simpler days; she must always be different hereafter, and profounder, because Kant lived."

"Where Kant primarily influenced Hayek was in ontology and metaphysics—Hayek’s comprehensive and total view of the world and of life experience—as a number of writers and philosophers, including Tibor Machan, maintain. Machan remarks that Hayek’s “conception of how we are aware of reality manifests his basically Kantian framework.” Hayek, following in a long line of Germanic and idealist philosophers, adopted a view of reality as “the relation between the physical and the sensory world,” in the tradition of Kant, a tradition that, Hayek held, “goes back to Galileo Galilei, who in 1623 had written: ‘I think that these tastes, odors, colors, etc. are nothing else than mere names, but hold their residence solely in the sensitive body, so that, if the animal were removed, any such quality would be abolished and annihilated.’”"

"The very fact that the totality of our sense experiences is such that by means of thinking (operations with concepts, and the creation and use of definite functional relations between them, and the coordination of sense experiences to these concepts) it can be put in order, this fact is one which leaves us in awe, but which we shall never understand. One may say " the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility." It is one of the great realizations of Immanuel Kant that the setting up of a real external world would be senseless without this comprehensibility."

"All that is necessary is the statement of a set of rules, since without such rules the acquisition of knowledge in the desired sense would be impossible. One may compare these rules with the rules of a game in which, while the rules themselves are arbitrary, it is their rigidity alone which makes the game possible. However, the fixation will never be final. It will have validity only for a special field of application (i.e. there are no final categories in the sense of Kant)."

"Kant is a sort of highway with lots and lots of milestones. Then all the little dogs come and each deposits his contribution at the milestones."

"I am obviously schematizing a very long history, which is, however, fundamental. After Descartes, we have a subject of knowledge which poses for Kant the problem of knowing the relationship between the subject of ethics and that of knowledge. There was much debate in the Enlightenment as to whether these two subjects were completely different or not. Kant's solution was to find a universal subject that, to the extent it was universal, could be the subject of knowledge, but which demanded, nonetheless, an ethical attitude-precisely the relationship to the self which Kant proposes in The Critique of Practical Reason."

"I am almost amazed that you consider a professional philosopher capable of no confusion in concepts and definitions. Such things are nowhere more at home than among philosophers who are not mathematicians, and Wolff was no mathematician, even though he made cheap compen- diums. Look around among the philosophers of today, among Schelling, Hegel, Nees von Esenbeck, and their like; doesn't your hair stand on end at their definitions? Read in the history of ancient philosophy what kinds of definitions the men of that day, Plato and others, gave (I except Aristotle). But even in Kant it is often not much better; in my opinion his distinction between analytic and synthetic theorems is such a one that either peters out in a triviality or is false."

"In an order so extended as to transcend the comprehension and possible guidance of any single mind, a unified will can indeed hardly determine the welfare of its several members in terms of some particular conception of justice, or according to an agreed scale. Nor is this due merely to the problems of anthropomorphism. [...] The insight that general rules must prevail for spontaneity to flourish, as reaped by Hume and Kant, has never been refuted, merely neglected or forgotten."

"Then there's philosophy -- supposed to tackle everything. Does it? All any philosopher ever comes out with is exactly what be walked in with -- except for those self-deluded who prove their assumptions by their conclusions, in a circle. Like Kant."

"[I]t looks in the first moment as though his central concept of the "synthetic judgements a priori" had been completely annihilated by the discoveries of our century. The theory of relativity has... revealed entirely new features of space and time, of which nothing is seen in Kant's a priori forms of pure intuition. The law of causality is no longer applied in quantum theory and the law of conservation of matter is no longer true for the elementary particles. Obviously Kant could not have foreseen the new discoveries, but since he was convinced that his concepts would be "the basis of any future metaphysics that can be called science" it is interesting to see where his arguments have been wrong."

"With Kant, then, external reality thus drops almost totally out of the picture, and we are trapped inescapably in subjectivity—and that is why Kant is a landmark. Once reason is in principle severed from reality, one then enters a different philosophical universe altogether. This interpretive point about Kant is crucial and controversial. An analogy may help drive the point home. Suppose a thinker argued the following: 'I am an advocate of freedom for women. Options and the power to choose among them are crucial to our human dignity. And I am wholeheartedly an advocate of women’s human dignity. But we must understand that a scope of a woman’s choice is confined to the kitchen. Beyond the kitchen’s door she must not attempt to exercise choice. Within the kitchen, however, she has a whole feast of choices—whether to cook or clean, whether to cook rice or potatoes, whether to decorate in blue or yellow. She is sovereign and autonomous. And the mark of a good woman is a well-organized and tidy kitchen.' No one would mistake such a 'thinker for an advocate of woman’s freedom. Anyone would point 'out that there is a whole world beyond the kitchen and that 'freedom is essentially about exercising choice about defining and 'creating one’s place in the world as a whole. The key point about Kant, to draw the analogy crudely, is that he prohibits knowledge of anything outside our skulls. He gives reason lots to do within the skull, and he does advocate a well-organized and tidy mind, but this hardly makes him a champion of reason. The point for any advocate of reason is that there is a whole world outside our skulls, and reason is essentially about knowing it. Kant’s contemporary Moses Mendelssohn was thus prescient in identifying Kant as 'the all-destroyer.'"

"The brightest object known was the sun. Therefore, the stars were assumed to be like the sun, and distances could be estimated from their apparent faintness. In this way, the conception of a stellar system, isolated in space, was formulated as early as 1750. The author was Thomas Wright... But Wright's speculations went beyond the Milky Way. A single stellar system, isolated in the universe, did not satisfy his philosophical mind. He imagined other, similar systems and, as visible evidence of their existence, referred to the mysterious clouds called "nebulæ." Five years later, Immanuel Kant developed Wright's conception in a form that endured, essentially unchanged, for the following century and a half. Some of Kant's remarks concerning the theory furnish an excellent example or reasonable speculation based on the principle of uniformity. ...The theory, which came to be known as the theory of island universes, found a permanent place in the body of philosophical speculation. ...Toward the end of the nineteenth century... the accumulation of observational data brought into prominence the problem of the status of the nebulæ and, with it, the theory of the island universes as a possible solution."

"Immanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable."

"[…]Kant believed that world peace was possible only if the enlightened elites in each country worked hard to promote conscience. Without conscience there would be no peace, no matter how much efforts a society of nations would make. I am not sure that Kant’s notion of conscience was the same as Dr. Hong’s and Tai Ji Men’s. Kant’s one was deeply rooted in a Protestant sense of guilt and sin, and he saw it more as an inner tribunal delivering an internal verdict of guilt for the bad actions we have performed. Yet, his idea of a necessary connection between peace and conscience remains valid."

"Each sensory system first analyzes and deconstructs, then restructures the raw, incoming information to its own built-in connections and rules—shades of Immanuel Kant."

"Unlike vision, touch, or smell, which are prewired and based on Kantian a priori knowledge, the spatial map presents us with a new type of representation, one based on a combination of a priori knowledge and learning."

"Kant's critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth."

"Kant truly says "it is the fate of human reason in speculation to build as rapidly as possible, and only when the edifice is completed to examine the solidity of its foundations." And the source of such carelessness he finds in this, that knowledge often consisting in the analysis of our conceptions, we are led to pay exclusive attention to them, rather than to their origin."

"Kant (Immanuel), Royal Professor of Morals and Metaphysics in the University of Konigsberg, is considered by his admirers as the greatest philosopher that Germany ever produced. Were we to form an estimate of his merits from the different views that have been given in English of his celebrated system, we certainly should not consider him as entitled to that character; for those views are obscured by new and uncouth terms, and are altogether wrapt up in a style which approaches nearer to jargon than to the luminous composition of a man who thinks with clearness and precision. We readily admit, that it is very difficult to translate a novel system of metaphysics from one language into another; for the translator, to perform his task properly, must be not only a complete master of both languages, but also a profound metaphysician; and not one of the translators or abridgers of the works of Kant into our language appears to us possessed of both these qualities. Despairing, from our scanty knowledge of the German language, of performing ourselves what so many others have failed to perform, we have applied for assistance to an illustrious Frenchman, who has resided many years in Germany, who is master of both languages, who is a profound metaphysician, and whose name, were we at liberty to publish it, would reflect luster upon our Work. From him we have reason to expect a clear and comprehensive view of the Critical Philosophy, as Kant terms his system; but should we be disappointed of our expectation, we shall, under that title, lay before our readers a specimen of the system from the different views of it which have been published in our own tongue."

"What is the attraction of Kuhn’s account of science? It has its roots far back in time, with the biggest self-deluder of all, Immanuel Kant. The hand of Kant lies behind both Bohr and Kuhn. In his epic and epically incomprehensible masterpiece The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant pulled off the grandest intellectual hocus-pocus in scholarly history. […] Kant argued that what have been taken to be features of a mind-independent reality—the structure of space and time, the existence of cause and effect, the law of conservation of energy—are actually imposed upon our experience by the mind itself. We have no justification for thinking that reality is intrinsically spatiotemporal or causally structured. But we are nonetheless eternally destined to experience the world in those terms because those are the intellectual and perceptive structures we must bring to our experience. Kant’s argumentation for this Parmenidean thesis is famously obscure, and his writing forbiddingly impenetrable. But the moral he wanted to draw, which goes by the name of transcendental idealism, is easily summarized. I just did. And for whatever reason, this conclusion of Kant’s has been attracting people like a siren’s call ever since. Remarkably, many people just want Kant’s conclusion to be true."

"Kant was probably the worst writer ever heard of on earth before Karl Marx. Some of his ideas were really quite simple, but he always managed to make them seem unintelligible. I hope he is in Hell."

"I might...say that to all those à priori moralists who deem it necessary to argue at all, utilitarian arguments are indispensable...I cannot help referring, for illustration, to a systematic treatise by one of the most illustrious of them, the Metaphysics of Ethics, by Kant. This remarkable man, whose system of thought will long remain one of the landmarks in the history of philosophical speculation, does, in the treatise in question, lay down an universal first principle as the origin and ground of moral obligation; it is this:—'So act, that the rule on which thou actest would admit of being adopted as a law by all rational beings.' But when he begins to deduce from this precept any of the actual duties of morality, he fails, almost grotesquely, to show that there would be any contradiction, any logical (not to say physical) impossibility, in the adoption by all rational beings of the most outrageously immoral rules of conduct. All he shows is that the consequences of their universal adoption would be such as no one would choose to incur."

"As Immanuel Kant pointed out long ago, learning to learn is one of the things that we cannot learn from experience. [see Critique of Pure Reason quote above on à priori and à posteriori knowledge] ...So although sensations give us "occasions" to learn, this cannot be what makes us "able", to learn, because we first must have the additional knowledge that our brains would need, as Kant has said, to "produce representations" and then "to connect" them. Such additional knowledge would also include inborn ways to recognize correlations and other relations among sensations. I suspect that... our brains are already innately endowed with machinery to help us "to compare, to connect, or to separate" objects so that we can represent them as existing in space."

"The bridge of thoughts and sighs that spans the whole history of the Aryan world has its first arch in the Vedas, its last in Kant’s Critique. While in the Veda we may study the childhood, we may study in Kant’s Critique of pure Reason the perfect manhood of the Aryan mind."

"Nothing works a more complete and penetrating disaster than every "impersonal" duty, every sacrifice before the Moloch of abstraction.—To think that no one has thought of Kant's categorical imperative as dangerous to life! … What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure—as a mere automaton of duty? That is the recipe for decadence, and no less for idiocy. … Instinct at fault in everything and anything, instinct as a revolt against nature, German decadence as a philosophy—that is Kant!"

"Kant's view of the nature of what is "actually real" remained unaltered throughout his life. Reality is in itself a system of existing thought-essences brought into a unity by teleological relations that are intuitively thought by the Divine intellect, and by this very act of thought posited as real. ...If one... makes Kant either a sceptical agnostic who teaches the unknowableness of things-in-themselves, or a subjective idealist for whom there is no reality in itself at all, he will never be able to make anything of his philosophy. ...Kant is no forbidding or threatening name, but a kindly disposed patron. It happens that for many the Critique of Pure Reason is the first philosophical book that they seriously attempt to read. ...the book is not well suited to this purpose. Kant himself would not have recommended it. He did not even write the Prolegomena for pupils, but for future teachers of philosophy. ...They presuppose nothing less than an acquaintance with the entire state of philosophy at the time, with dogmatism and scepticism, with Leibniz and Hume. ...Kant's philosophy is the door to the philosophy of our century, and the door to the Kantian philosophy is the Critique of Pure Reason."

"For Kant, there are no different religions, but rather different forms of belief in divine revelation [...] among which Christianity, as far as we know, is the most appropriate."

"Individualism, united with altruism, has become the basis of our western civilization. It is the central doctrine of Christianity ('love your neighbor,' say the Scriptures, not 'love your tribe'); and it is the core of all ethical doctrines which have grown from our civilization and stimulated it. It is also, for instance, Kant's central practical doctrine ("always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as mere means to your end.")"

"I was shocked many years ago when a physicist said to me that Kant was the greatest astrophysicist in a hundred-year period. And I asked “Why do you say that? You talk about Kant-Lagrange hypothesis?” He said “No, that was only a hypothesis. Kant showed by a very eloquent geometrical argument that we live near the edge of landscape galaxy in the center of the sphere that resembles Andromeda nebula”. I never heard of that, no philosopher told me that, no historian of philosophy told me that, an astronomer told me that! It was Steven Weinberg; he then said that Kant was the only astrophysicist in about a hundred years who believed that star clustering could be accounted for by gravitation alone."

"Immanuel Kant was the first hippie in history."

"I, for one, while I would not choose to dismiss Kant, am certainly prepared to dismiss his writing style. It was, indeed, in his own day, profitably parodied by Fichte."

"[T]here used to be in the old days three intellectual arguments for the existence of God, all of which were disposed of by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason; but no sooner had he disposed of those arguments than he invented a new one, a moral argument, and that quite convinced him. He was like many people: in intellectual matters he was skeptical, but in moral matters he believed implicitly in the maxims that he had imbibed at his mother's knee. That illustrates what the psychoanalysts so much emphasize — the immensely stronger hold upon us that our very early associations have than those of later times."

"From childish fear springs the desire to externalise the ego. Metaphysicians do this in thought: Kant, who, in real life, never went more than ten miles from his native city of Königsberg, maintained that the whole of space existed only in his imagination. This grandiose philosophy was merely the obverse of his practical timidity."

"I should liken Kant to a man at a ball, who all evening has been carrying on a love affair with a masked beauty in the vain hope of making a conquest, when at last she throws off her mask and reveals herself to be his wife."

"Einstein has not — as you sometimes hear — given the lie to Kant’s deep thoughts on the idealization of space and time; he has, on the contrary, made a large step towards its accomplishment."

"Even when altruism is allowed (as, for example, in Gary Becker's model of rational allocation), it is assumed that the altruistic actions are undertaken because they promote each person's own interests; there are personal gains to the altruist's own welfare, thanks to sympathy for others. No role is given to any sense of commitment about behaving well or to pursuing some selfless objective. All this leaves out, on the one hand, the evil passions that early theorists of capitalism contrasted with selfinterest and, on the other, the social commitments that Kant analyzed in The Critique of Practical Reason and that Adam Smith discussed in The Theory of Moral Sentiments."

"”Prussia,” remarked Mirabeau, ”is not a state with an army, but an army with a state.” And the state, which was run with the efficiency and soullessness of a factory, became all; the people were little more than cogs in the machinery. Individuals were taught not only by the kings and the drill sergeants but by the philosophers that their role in life was one of obedience, work, sacrifice and duty. Even Kant preached that duty demands the suppression of human feeling…"

"Kant's 'discovery' went thus. Any property that a real x had, an imaginary x could have, and any property that an imaginary x could have, a real x could have. So Existence is not a property. (Hearty applause, maintained steadily for 200 years so far.)"

"Kant's questions are so strange and arresting that no one who has once heard them ever forgets them. It is just the reverse with his answers to them: no one can ever remember what these are! And there is a simple reason for this: the questions never get answered at all. Once they have served as an excuse for the darkening of sufficient area of wood-pulp, they just get lost."

"The man Butler, whose works were perhaps known to the man Kant, wished to save the belief in the immortality of the soul, and with this object he made it independent of belief in God. The first chapter of his Analogy treats, as I have said, of the future life, and the second of the government of God by rewards and punishments. And the fact is that, fundamentally, the good Anglican bishop deduces the existence of God from the immortality of the soul. And as this deduction was the good Anglican bishop's starting-point, he had not to make that somersault which at the close of the same century the good Lutheran philosopher had to make. Butler, the bishop, was one man and Kant, the professor, another man."

"Kant believed that the concept of time is a prior condition of our minds that affects our experience of the world, but this does not explain why different human societies have had different concepts of time and have assigned different degrees of significance to the temporal aspect of phenomena. ...instead of being a prior condition, our concept of time should be regarded as a consequence of our experience of the world, the result of a long evolution. ...In recent years it has become clear that all our mental abilities are potential capacities which we can only realize in practice by learning how to use them."

"Today, at any leading American university, a Kant, with all his dithering about God, freedom, and immortality, or even a Hume, wouldn't survive a year in graduate school, much less get hired as an instructor."

"I regard every Social Democrat as an enemy of the Empire and Fatherland."

"The soldier and the army, not Parliamentary majorities and decisions, have welded the German Empire together. I put my trust in the army."

"There is only one person who is master in this Empire and I am not going to tolerate any other."

"You [recruits] have sworn loyalty to me. You have only one enemy and that is my enemy. In the present social confusion, it may come about that I order you to shoot down your own relatives, brothers or parents but even then you must follow my orders without a murmur."

"I am just now not reading but devouring Captain Mahan's book and am trying to learn it by heart. It is a first-class book and classical on all points."

"There is a breed of men who do not deserve the name of Germans. I trust that the entire nation will find the strength to beat back their outrageous attacks. If that does not occur, I shall have to call on you, my Guards, for protection against the gang of traitors and for leading the battle which will free us from such elements."

"The Party which dares to attack the foundations of our State, which sets itself against religion and does not stop at attacking the person of the All-Highest Ruler must be rooted out to the very last stump."

"The poor French...They have not read their Mahan!"

"Imagine a monarch, holding personal command of his army, disbanding his regiments, sacred with a hundred years of history—and handing his towns over to Anarchists and Democracy."

"The British navy is strong enough to defy any hostile combination; Germany has, practically speaking, no navy. I am therefore compelled to observe the strictest neutrality. Before everything else I must provide myself with a navy. In twenty years' time, when the navy is ready, I shall speak a very different language."

"I am not a man who believes that we Germans bled and conquered thirty years ago...in order to be pushed to one side when great international decisions call to be made. If that were to happen, the place of Germany as a world power would be gone for ever, and I am not prepared to let that happen. It is my duty and privilege to employ to this end without hesitation the most appropriate and, if need be, the sharper methods."

"Should you encounter the enemy, he will be defeated! No quarter will be given! Prisoners will not be taken! Whoever falls into your hands is forfeited. Just as a thousand years ago the Huns under their King Attila made a name for themselves, one that even today makes them seem mighty in history and legend, may the name German be affirmed by you in such a way in China that no Chinese will ever again dare to look cross-eyed at a German."

"In spite of the fact that we have no such fleet as we should have, we have conquered for ourselves a place in the sun. It will now be my task to see to it that this place in the sun shall remain our undisputed possession, in order that the sun's rays may fall fruitfully upon our activity and trade in foreign parts, that our industry and agriculture may develop within the state and our sailing sports upon the water, for our future lies upon the water."

"I repudiate these attacks on him...a German of the Germans...his honour so assailed. Who made this infamous attack upon our friend? Men who till now have been looked upon as Germans, but who henceforth are unworthy of that name. And these men come from the Reich's working classes, who owe so infinite a debt of gratitude to Krupp!"

"[The German Legion] which, in conjunction with Blucher and the Prussians at Waterloo, saved the British Army from destruction."

"The Tsar is not treacherous but he is weak. Weakness is not treachery, but it fulfils all its functions."

"Shoot down, behead and eliminate the Socialists first, if need be, by a blood-bath, then war abroad. But not before, and not à tempo."

"You British are mad, like bulls seeing a red rag! What has happened to you to overwhelm us with suspicions that are unworthy of a great nation! What else shall I do? I have always described myself as a friend of Britain. ... Have I ever broken my word? ... This misunderstanding strikes me as a personal insult."

"I look on myself as an instrument of the Almighty and go on my way regardless of transient opinions and views."

"Krupp cannon have thundered over the battlefields where German unity was fought for and won, and Krupp cannon are the energy of the German army and navy today. The ships constructed in the Krupp yards carry the German flag into every sea. Krupp steel protects our vessels and our forts...But the Krupp works has not only been an exploiter in this sense. It has also been the first in Germany to recognize the new social problems and to seek to solve them, thus leading to social legislation."

"[The unavoidable] racial war, the war of Slavdom against Germandom...[in which the] Anglo-Saxons with whom we are related by common ancestry, religion and civilisatory striving, allow themselves to be used as tools of the Slavs...if this question...cannot be solved by diplomacy, then it will have to be decided by armed force. The solution can be postponed but the question will arise again in 1 or 2 years. The racial struggle cannot be avoided - perhaps it will not take place now, but it will probably take place in one or two years."

"[The coming war is] the last battle between Teutons (Germans) and Slavs [which would] find the Anglo-Saxons on the side of the Slavs and the Gauls...[England] wanted to forbid other Powers to defend their interests...with the sword. … England will undoubtedly stand behind France and Russia against Germany out of hatred and envy. The imminent struggle for existence which the Germanic peoples of Europe (Austria, Germany) will have to fight out against the Slavs (Russians) and their Latin (Gallic) supporters finds the Anglo-Saxons on the side of the Slavs. Reason: petty envy, fear of our growing big."

"Chapter 2 of the Great Migrations...is over. Now comes Chapter 3, the Germanic peoples' fight for their existence against Russo-Gallia. No further conference can smooth this over, for it is not a question of high politics, but one of race...for what is at issue is whether the Germanic race is to be or not to be in Europe."

"The Slavs have now become unrestful and will want to attack Austria. Germany is bound to stand by her ally - Russia and France will join in and then England...I am a man of peace - but now I have to arm my Country so that whoever falls on me I can crush - and crush them I will."

"Must stay there and also foment war and revolt against England. Doesn't he yet know of the intended alliance, under which he is to be Commander in Chief?!"

"England must...have the mask of Christian peaceableness torn publicly off her face...Our consuls in Turkey and India, agents, etc., must inflame the whole Mohammedan world to wild revolt against this hateful, lying, conscienceless people of hagglers; for if we are to be bled to death, at least England shall lose India."

"You will be home before the leaves fall from the trees."

"Ich kenne keine Parteien mehr, ich kenne nur noch Deutsche!"

"Arise, to arms! All hesitation, all delay is treason to the country. It is a question of the life or death of our Empire, of the life or death of German Might. We shall defend ourselves to the last breath and to the last man. Though a world of enemies come, we shall fight notwithstanding. When Germany has remained united, she has never been vanquished. Forward with God, for God will be with us as He was with our fathers."

"Remember that you are a chosen people! The spirit of the Lord has descended upon me, because I am Emperor of the Germans! I am the instrument of the Most High. I am His sword, His representative. Woe and death to all those who resist my will! Woe and death to those who do not believe in my mission! Woe and death to the cowards! Let them perish,—all the enemies of the German people! God demands their destruction,—God who, through my mouth, commands you to execute His will."

"The population of Belgium...behaved in a diabolical, not to say bestial, manner, not one iota better than the Cossacks. They tortured the wounded, beat them to death, killed doctors and medical orderlies, fired secretly...on men harmlessly standing in the street - in fact by prearranged signal, under leadership...The King of the Belgians has to be notified at once that since his people have placed themselves outside all observance of European customs - from the frontier on, in all the villages, not only in Liege - they will be treated accordingly. Conditions for Belgium will become immensely more difficult."

"The shotgun is the most immoral and reprehensible weapon to ever be deployed. We fight this war with the hopes of vanquishing these weapons from the continent."

"[I myself will] never acknowledge an Englishman again for the rest of [my] life, nor wear an English Order on [my] chest. The fellows must be brought to their knees."

"The enemy must be vanquished completely and I will dictate the peace terms at the point of my soldiers' bayonets."

"I shan't give this up again, I swear to you."

"Agreed, reject...This is the end of negotiations with America, once and for all! If Wilson wants war, let him provoke it and then have it."

"Where my Guards appear, there is no room for democracy."

"God willing we shall be able to impose the coming peace upon our enemies, which we must do. They will only sue for peace when they have been beaten so badly that they have had enough. Once they admit to that they will have to accept a peace which takes into account the new and heavy loss of blood suffered by the German people solely as a result of their pigheadedness. The peace must – if needs be at their expense and without regard for their feelings in the future – contain such real guarantees for us that a world combination such as the present one can never again be successfully put together against us. That is to say a genuine, proper, common-or-garden peace of the kind that has so far always been signed after a victorious war. There is no place in such a peace for dreams of human happiness or humanitarian cosmopolitanism, only one's own naked self-interest and the guarantee of one's own security and greatness must count. The vanquished must submit to his fate!"

"The victory of the Germans over Russia was the pre-condition for the revolution, which was the pre-condition for Lenin, who was the pre-condition for Brest! The same applies in the west! First victory in the west and collapse of the Entente, then we shall make conditions which they have to accept! And they will be framed purely in accordance with our interests."

"I will take the Duchy of Courland, I, the victor by the strength of my sword, but not from the hand of the assembly."

"The battle is won, the English have been utterly defeated."

"If a British parliamentarian comes to sue for peace, he must first kneel before the imperial standard, for this is a victory of monarchy over democracy."

"[Peace] is completely impossible between Slavs and Germans...Peace with Russia can only be maintained by fear of us. The Slavs will always hate us and remain our enemies! they are only frightened of a man and they only respect him if he hits them hard! S. [see] Japan! So it will be with us, too! The Entente, if it wants, and if my diplomacy is too stupid, can always do what it likes in Russia - it has driven it into war; but our preponderance in the German area is necessary to keep Russia away from our eastern frontier once and for all; no peace with Russia, however favourable, will give us that!"

"Either Germanic ideals or Anglo-Saxon ones must prevail. Justice, freedom, honor, and virtue will triumph, or the worship of money. There can be only one victor in this struggle. German ideals are at stake!"

"I see that we must strike a balance. We have nearly reached the limit of our powers of resistance. The war must be ended."

"I haven't had a wink of sleep since I left Wilhelmshohe. I'm gradually cracking up. The troops continue to retreat. I have lost all confidence in them."

"But there have been those who did not want to work, but wanted to rest on their laurels. They were our enemies. We angered them through our prosperous development, our industry and science, our art and popular education, social legislation, etc. That raised our nation to a high place, and then came envy. Envy caused our opponents to fight, and so the war came over us who had no idea of it."

"The war has ended - quite differently, indeed, from how we expected. Our politicians have failed us miserably."

"Well, this is a strange reversal of the situation. The English are at loggerheads with the Americans. The Lansdowne Clique has coalesced with the Labour Party to obtain a swift acceptable peace for Germany. It seems that Lloyd George put pressure on him to this end. On the other hand we know that the Paris Senate has said that it will not come to the conference table to sue for peace but pursue the war with every means in its power. After your report I'll read you a confidential letter I have received from an agent in Holland...The agent...points to a possibility of coming to terms with England, which is obviously perturbed by American numerical superiority, and thinks we should have done better not to make peace overtures to America but to England...An agreement with England, to include a treaty with Japan to fling the Americans out of Europe. A European Monroe doctrine therefore to which I outlined to Hintze at Spa as the policy to be followed in future."

"The deepest, most disgusting shame ever perpetrated by a people in history, the Germans have done onto themselves. Egged on and misled by the tribe of Juda whom they hated, who were guests among them! That was their thanks! Let no German ever forget this, nor rest until these parasites have been destroyed and exterminated from German soil! This poisonous mushroom on the German oak-tree!"

"The Engl[ish], French and German Jews were all in cahoots with one another. Their sole aim was to establish the Jewish domination of the world. Therefore they first had to enslave the German people completely. The Engl[ish] Prime Minister [David Lloyd George] was completely in the hands of the Jews...When a new era dawned once more in Germany the Jews would meet their fate in no uncertain terms. They had syphoned off some 80 billions out of the country. They would have to repay all of this, the government must start by demanding 15 billions immediately. They would have to forfeit everything, their art collections, their houses, all their property. They would have to be removed once and for all from all their public offices, they must be thrown completely to the ground."

"A Jew cannot be a true patriot. He is something different, like a bad insect. He must be kept apart, out of a place where he can do mischief – even by pogroms, if necessary. The Jews are responsible for Bolshevism in Russia, and Germany too. I was far too indulgent with them during my reign, and I bitterly regret the favors I showed the prominent Jewish bankers."

"All the Jews needed to be expelled from the press, none of them could be allowed to work their poison in this way, one day I would see, on his restoration, what a pogrom there would then be, but of a different and more effective kind than all those in Galicia!"

"England, France, and Russia have conspired...to wage a war of annihilation against us."

"They [Jews] belong to the Coloured Races and not the European White Race...which they intend to enervate, subjugate and destroy!"

"Our Christian God, the merciful, forgiving God, the personification of eternal love, our father, as Christ has taught us, had absolutely not the slightest thing in common with the vengeful bloodthirsty, angry old Jahweh of the Jews...the old Jew-God Jahweh is...identical with Satan!"

"The Hebrew race are my most inveterate enemies at home and abroad; they remain what they are and always were: the forgers of lies and the masterminds governing unrest, revolution, upheaval by spreading infamy with the help of their poisoned, caustic, satyrical spirit. If the world once wakes up it should mete out to them the punishment in store for them, which they deserve."

"Press, Jews & Mosquitoes...are a nuisance that humanity must get rid of in some way or another. I believe the best would be gas?"

"For the first time, I am ashamed to be a German."

"There's a man alone, without family, without children, without God ... He Hitler] builds legions, but he doesn't build a nation. A nation is created by families, a religion, traditions: it is made up out of the hearts of mothers, the wisdom of fathers, the joy and the exuberance of children ... For a few months I was inclined to believe in National Socialism. I thought of it as a necessary fever. And I was gratified to see that there were, associated with it for a time, some of the wisest and most outstanding Germans. But these, one by one, he has got rid of or even killed ... He has left nothing but a bunch of shirted gangsters! This man could bring home victories to our people each year, without bringing them either glory or danger. But of our Germany, which was a nation of poets and musicians, of artists and soldiers, he has made a nation of hysterics and hermits, engulfed in a mob and led by a thousand liars or fanatics.""

"Under the deeply moving impression of France's capitulation I congratulate you and all the German armed forces on the God-given prodigious victory with the words of Kaiser Wilhelm the Great of the year 1870: "What a turn of events through God's dispensation!" All German hearts are filled with the chorale of Leuthen, which the victors of [the Battle of] Leuthen, the soldiers of the Great King sang [in 1757]: Now thank we all our God!"

"I was deeply moved by the incomparable achievements of the German Wehrmacht, leading to such prodigious successes. I followed the development of operations in minute detail with the aid of maps. Under brilliant leadership all sections of the armed forces displayed the greatest courage to achieve deeds that were quite stunning. The ignominy of November 1918 in the forest of Compiègne has been wiped out and the Diktat of Versailles torn up!"

"[The English ruling classes are] Freemasons thoroughly infected by Juda. The British people must be liberated from the Antichrist Juda. We must drive Juda out of England just as he has been chased out of the Continent...Juda's plan has been smashed to pieces and they themselves swept out of the European Continent! [Europe is] consolidating and closing itself off from British influences after the elimination of the British and the Jews!"

"[The war is] a succession of miracles! The old Prussian spirit of Frd. Rex, of Clausewitz, Blücher, York, Gneisenau etc. has again manifested itself, as in 1870-71...The brilliant leading Generals in this war came from My school, they fought under my command in the [[World War I|[First] World War]] as lieutenants, captains or young majors. Educated by Schlieffen they put the plans he had worked out under me into practice along the same lines as we did in 1914."

"The hand of God is creating a new World & working miracles...We are becoming the U.S. of Europe under German leadership, a united European Continent, nobody ever hoped to see. The Jews [are] beeing thrust out of their nefarious positions in all countries, whom they have driven to hostility for centuries."

"The feats of our brave troops are wonderful, God gave them success. — May He continue to help them to peace with honour, & the victory over Juda & Antichrist in British garb."

"The fleet is necessary to show that Germany is as well-born as Britain."

"Let me assure the Sultan and the three hundred million Moslems... That the German Emperor will ever be their friend."

"You English are like mad bulls — you see red everywhere! What on earth has come over you, that you would heap on us such suspicion as is unworthy of a great nation... I regard this misapprehension as a personal insult... You make it uncommonly difficult for a man to remain friendly to England."

"Having succeeded to the throne of my ancestors, I have taken over the government, relying upon the King of Kings, and I have vowed to God that, acting in accordance with the example of my predecessors, I will endeavour to be a just and clement ruler, that I will encourage piety and the fear of God, that I will uphold peace and promote the welfare of the country, and further, that I will strive to be a helper to the poor and oppressed and a faithful guardian of the law."

"The king holds his power by the grace of God, to whom alone he is responsible. He chooses his own path, and only decides his actions from this point of view. It is the Kingship by the grace of God, the Kingship with its heavy duties, its never finished, unending toils and labours, with its dread responsibility to the Creator alone, from which no man, no minister, no House of Deputies, and no people can release the Prince."

"I, too, like my imperial grandfather, represent the kingship by God's grace. My grandfather believed that the functions of the king were a task given to him by God, a task to which it was his duty to devote his strength up to the last moment of his life. What he thought I also think."

"Our first and foremost duty is to show ourselves worthy of our ancestors and their achievements. And that we can only do by an undeviating adherence to the paths which they traced out for our guidance."

"The Great Elector is the one among my ancestors whom I have regarded with the most enthusiastic admiration, and from my youth up have set before my eyes as my model."

"Our predecessors have gone; we remain; and it is our duty to preserve what they bequeathed us."

"My life and my work belong to my people, the promotion of whose welfare is the noblest task of my kingly office."

"I am of opinion that in the position in which I am placed it is of far greater service to me to confer benefits on mankind than to inspire them with fear."

"When I have to act or think I always ask myself the question: What does the Bible say in similar circumstances? The Bible is for me a spring whence I draw strength and light."

"I solemnly vow always to be mindful of the fact that the eyes of my ancestors are looking down upon me from the other world, and that one day I shall have to render to them an account of both the glory and the honour of the Army."

"If you are good soldiers, you must also be good Christians and religious at heart. He who is no good Christian is no good man and also no Prussian soldier, and can under no circumstances perform what is required of a soldier in the Prussian Army."

"Germany is in no need of fresh military glory, nor does she require any new conquests, for she has already obtained once for all, on the field of battle, the right to exist as an united and independent nation."

"I have sworn to myself that I will neglect nothing to bring about the unity of our people, and to crush everything that tends to divide the nation."

"I look upon the people and nation handed on to me as a responsibility conferred upon me by God, and that it is, as is written in the Bible, my duty to increase this heritage, for which one day I shall be called upon to give an account; those who try to interfere with my task I shall crush."

"The present age delights in casting many a glance backward at the past, and in comparing it with the existing state of things, mostly to the disadvantage of the latter. He who can look back at such a glorious past as, thank God, we Germans can, does well to do so, in order to learn many a lesson therefrom. In a monarchical state this is called tradition."

"The essence of nationality is demarcation from the outside world by a definite boundary to correspond with the personal characteristics of a nation and its racial idiosyncrasies."

"I made up my mind after reading the lessons of history never to dream of a vast world-empire. For what has become of all those so-called world-empires? Alexander, Napoleon and all such great captains bathed themselves in blood, and yet left behind them subjugated peoples, who, after those great men had died, rose in revolt and ruined the Empires they had created."

"I dream of an Empire and it is this: The newly-born German Empire must possess the confidence of everybody, must be considered everywhere as a quiet, honest and peaceful neighbour; and if some day in the future a German world-empire is spoken of, it must not be based on the conquests of the sword, but on the reciprocal confidences of nations united for an identical end."

"By God's grace our German stock has been able to produce mighty heroes of thought, from Boniface and Walter von der Vogelweide down to Goethe and Schiller, and they have become a light and blessing to all posterity. They worked for humanity at large, and yet they were strictly well-contained Germans, that is to say, personalities, men. We need such men to-day more than ever."

"The feeling of sympathy for science which is innate in every Prussian king is also active in me."

"Our future lies upon the water. To the sea our thoughts are turned—the sea, which is the symbol of eternity. Seas do not separate; they unite."

"The German fleet is the youngest fleet in the world, and another proof of the growing importance of the new German Empire. It is destined to protect the commerce and territory of this Empire, and it will, like the German Army, serve to keep the peace of the world."

"Should it ever happen that the British and German Navies have to fight side by side against a common foe, then the famous signal "England expects that every man will do his duty," which England's greatest naval hero gave out before the battle of Trafalgar, will find an echo in the patriotic heart of the German Navy."

"It is understood that a defensive fleet does not merely serve to protect the interests of the traders of our great commercial cities, but that it is also needed, and bitterly needed, for the protection of the industry of our entire people and their success in the world."

"To protect Germany's sea trade and colonies, in the existing circumstances, there is only one means: Germany must have a battle fleet so strong that, even for the adversary with the greatest sea-power, a war against it would involve such dangers as to imperil its position in the world."

"The King of Prussia stands so high above all political parties and the wire-pulling and hatred of politicians, that he can contemplate his subjects without taking these things into account, and can thus work for the benefit of each one of his people and each separate province."

"Our people must resolve to make sacrifices; above all, they must divest themselves of their passion for seeking the highest good in ever more and more sharply accentuated party struggles. They must cease to place the party above the welfare of the whole."

"My people must aid me in my duties, not by angry speeches or by the unreasonable opposition of political parties, but by explaining their difficulties to their Sovereign and showing confidence in him."

"Our wives can learn from Queen Louise that the principal task of a woman does not lie in the domain of political meetings and propaganda, but in the quiet duties of the hearth and of family."

"No morning or evening passes without my offering up a prayer for my people."

"I like to read the Bible, and I read it every day. I always have it beside my bed, and I cannot understand how there can be so many people who take such little heed of the Word of God."

"No words of man have ever been uttered worthy of comparison with the words of Christ."

"An exemplary Christian life, charitable love of our neighbour, and our weak or suffering brethren, the fear of God, loyalty to king and love of country—these are virtues to be practised, and these are the arms to which God will give the victory."

"I verily believe that everyone must feel a touch of inspiration when he stands before the altar and looks at the crucifix."

"Religion has never risen from science: it is an overflowing of the heart of man in his relations with God."

"Every Catholic ought to know that I honour his religion and that he will never be prevented in his exercise of it if he respects the beliefs of those who profess other faiths."

"My Catholic subjects can rely on my Imperial protection, wherever and whenever they may stand in need of it."

"May we always be mindful that it is our duty to protect religion which should be preserved for the nation, and to uphold morals and order."

"I am opposed to war; but war can only be avoided by exerting to the utmost the defensive forces of the State."

"I am well aware of the fact that by the public at large, and particularly in foreign countries, I am represented as entertaining a wanton and ambitious craving for war. May God keep me from such criminal folly."

"It is the power of tradition which on the field of battle as well as in peace makes men's heart beat higher for king and country, and inspires them to brave deeds."

"The same blood runs in English and German veins. I am a friend of England. The prevailing sentiment among large sections of the middle and lower classes of my own people is not friendly to England. I am, therefore, so to speak, in a minority in my own land; but it is a minority of the best elements."

"The British troops have filled me with the greatest admiration. If the possibility of a volunteer army is ever doubted, I shall be able to give such an army a testimony of efficiency."

"Germany possesses an army commensurate with her needs, and if Great Britain has a navy corresponding to her requirements, Europe in general cannot fail to regard it as a most important factor for the maintenance of peace."

"Among the many eminent qualities which the Americans possess, it is, above all, their spirit of enterprise, their sense of order, and their inventive capacity, which attract the attention of the whole world."

"The cultivation of ideals is the greatest work of civilization."

"All the works of man perish and decay."

"Why did the German Empire sink into decay? Because the old Empire was not founded on a strictly national basis. The idea of universal rule that underlay the Holy Roman Empire precluded a development on national German lines."

"Why are so many of our young men led astray? Why do so many reformers of the world make their appearance with their incoherent, confused theories? Why is it that there is always so much grumbling at our Government, and why are we so often referred to foreign countries for an example? Because young men do not know how our conditions have developed, and further, that they are but the outcome of the era of the French Revolution."

"If civilization is to fully perform its task, it must permeate to the lowest ranks of the people."

"There will come a day when Berlin will be the most beautiful city in the world."

"In the century to come, in spite of all new spirits and ideas, may the old loyalty to the monarchy show itself firm as a rock and as an example for other countries."

"Every man, however simple-minded he may be, has a feeling for what is beautiful or ugly."

"Under the much-used word freedom, and under its banner, artists often degenerate into monstrosity and exaggeration and conceit."

"I regard it as my duty, in the spirit of my parents, to hold my hand over my German people, its rising generation, to cultivate in them the sense of the beautiful, to develop in them a taste for art, but only on a definite path, only within definite limits, which lie in the feeling for beauty and harmony, that exists in the hearts of men."

"Sculpture has still for the most part remained untouched by the so-called modern tendencies and movements. It still stands there, noble and sublime."

"The man who breaks away from the law of beauty, the feeling for aesthetics and harmony, of which every human heart is sensible, even when it is unable to give it expression, and finds his main principle in the thought of some special tendency, some definite solution of what are rather technical problems, sins against the primary source and origin of art."

"My House has always cared for the working classes. The welfare of the working men lies near to my heart. Every subject who prefers a wish or petition has, as a matter of course, the ear of his Emperor."

"I do not disguise from myself the fact that I can never make all the members of our nation equally happy and contented. But I have good hope that I shall succeed in bringing about a state of things with which all can be content who have the will to be so."

"I lend my hand to any plan that can help to further the great cause of peace."

"I only wish that European peace lay in my hands. I should certainly take care it should never be disturbed."

"The German Empire, far from being a danger to other States, will be respected and trusted by the nations, and will remain as heretofore a mainstay of peace."

"It is, of course, my first duty to do everything that is possible to preserve peace, this is only natural, considering what work The North German Lloyd is called upon to perform; for trade and commerce can only thrive and flourish when business can be conducted under sure care and protection."

"The present situation arose not from temporary conflicts of interest or diplomatic combinations, but is the result of ill-will existing for years against the strength and prosperity of the German Empire. We are not pushed on by the desire of conquest; we are moved by the unbending desire to secure for ourselves and those coming after us the place on which God has put us."

"No one should judge the career of the Emperor William II without asking the question, "What should I have done in his position?" Imagine yourself brought up from childhood to believe that you were appointed by God to be the ruler of a mighty nation, and that the inherent virtue of your blood raised you far above ordinary mortals. Imagine succeeding in the twenties to the garnered prizes, in provinces, in power and in pride, of Bismarck's three successive victorious wars. Imagine feeling the magnificent German race bounding beneath you in ever-swelling numbers, strength, wealth and ambition; and imagine on every side the thunderous tributes of crowd-loyalty and the skilled unceasing flattery of courtierly adulation."

"I do not think there is another ruler who had better intentions than he had. He lived only for his calling—as he viewed it. All his thoughts and longings were centred round Germany. His relations, pleasures and amusements were all subservient to the one idea of making and keeping the German people great and happy, and if good will were sufficient to achieve great things William II would have achieved them."

"Every new publication makes the image of this weakling, coward, domineering brute and braggart, this posing dunce who plunged Germany into misfortune even more repugnant. There is not a single trait in him that could arouse sympathy or pity; he is entirely contemptible."

"[G]ifted, with a quick understanding, sometimes brilliant, with a taste for the modern — technology, industry, science — but at the same time superficial, hasty, restless, unable to relax, without any deeper level of seriousness, without any desire for hard work or drive to see things through to the end, without any sense of sobriety, for balance and boundaries, or even for reality and real problems, uncontrollable and scarcely capable of learning from experience, desperate for applause and success — as Bismarck said early on in his life, he wanted every day to be his birthday — romantic, sentimental and theatrical, unsure and arrogant, with an immeasurably exaggerated self-confidence and desire to show off, a juvenile cadet, who never took the tone of the officers' mess out of his voice, and brashly wanted to play the part of the supreme warlord, full of panicky fear of a monotonous life without any diversions, and yet aimless, pathological in his hatred against his English mother."

"With his contempt for everything civil, his contempt for the Slavs, his hatred of the Jews, his escalating fantasies of world power, he represented attitudes and ideas that were taken up, radicalized and put into practice by the National Socialists. In this respect, it is quite justified to call him a harbinger of Hitler."

"Es handelt sich um meinen liebsten Jugendtraum, nämlich um den Nachweis, dass die Abel’schen Gleichungen mit Quadratwurzeln rationaler Zahlen durch die Transformations-Gleichungen elliptischer Functionen mit singularen Moduln grade so erschöpft werden, wie die ganzzahligen Abel’schen Gleichungen durch die Kreisteilungsgleichungen."

"Now it is time for us to realize that, in his Grundzüge, Kronecker did not merely intend to give his own treatment of the basic problems of ideal-theory which form the main subject of Dedekind's life-work. His aim was a higher own. He was, in fact, attempting to describe and to initiate a new branch of mathematics, which would contain both number-theory and algebraic geometry as special cases. This grandiose conception has been allowed to fade out of our sight, partly because of the intrinsic difficulties of carrying it out, partly owing to historical accidents and to the temporary successes of the partisans of purity and of Dedekind. It will be the main purpose of this lecture to try to rescue it from oblivion, to revive it, and to describe the few modern results which may be considered as belonging to the Kroneckerian program."

"I am of opinion that the idea of the Christian State is as old as the ci-devant Holy Roman Empire, as old as all the European States, that it is the soil in which these States have taken root, and that a State, if it would have an assured permanence, if it would only justify its existence, when it is disputed, must stand on a religious foundation. ... I believe I am right in calling that State a Christian State which seeks to realise the teaching of Christianity."

"I grant that I am full of prejudices; I sucked them in with my mother's milk, and I cannot possibly argue them away."

"The social insecurity of the worker is the real cause of their being a peril to the state."

"I shall soon be compelled to undertake the conduct of the Prussian Government. My first care will be to reorganise the army, with or without the help of the Landtag. ... As soon as the army shall have been brought into such a condition as to inspire respect, I shall seize the first best pretext to declare war against Austria, dissolve the German Diet, subdue the minor States, and give national unity to Germany under Prussian leadership. I have come here to say this to the Queen's Ministers."

"Nicht durch Reden und Majoritätsbeschlüsse werden die großen Fragen der Zeit entschieden — daß ist der große Fehler von 1848 und 1849 gewesen — sondern durch Eisen und Blut."

"Die Politik ist keine exakte Wissenschaft."

"I ask you what right had I to close the way to the throne against these people? The kings of Prussia have never been by preference kings of the rich. Frederick the Great said when Crown Prince: “Quand je serai roi, je serai un vrai roi des gueux.” He undertook to be the protector of the poor, and this principle has been followed by our later kings. At their throne suffering has always found a refuge and a hearing. ... Our kings have secured the emancipation of the serfs, they have created a thriving peasantry, and they may possibly be successful—the earnest endeavour exists, at any rate—in improving the condition of the working classes somewhat. To have refused access to the throne to the complaints of these operatives would not have been the right course to pursue, and it was, moreover, not my business to do it. The question would afterwards have been asked: “How rich must a deputation be in order to its reception by the King?”"

"Faust complains of having two souls in his breast. I have a whole squabbling crowd. It goes on as in a republic."

"Only a country's most vital interests justify its embarking on war. ... Aye, I made the war of 1866, fulfilling my harsh duty with a heavy heart, because without it the nation would have bogged down politically, soon to fall prey to avaricious neighbors; and if we stood in the same place where then we stood, I should resolutely make war again. Never, you may be sure, shall I counsel His Majesty to wage war unless the innermost interests of the fatherland request it."

"Mein lieber Professor, ein solcher Krieg hätte uns wenigstens 30,000 Mann brave Soldaten gekostet, und uns im besten Falle keinen Gewinn gebracht. Wer aber nur ein Mal in das brechende Auge eines sterbenden Kriegers auf dem Schlachtfeld geblickt hat, der besinnt sich, bevor er einen Krieg anfängt."

"A conquering army on the border will not be stopped by eloquence."

"The politician has not to revenge what has happened but to ensure that it does not happen again."

"Preventive war is like committing suicide for fear of death."

"There is no doubt, however, that I have caused unhappiness to great numbers. But for me three great wars would not have taken place, eighty thousand men would not have been killed and would not now be mourned by parents, brothers, sisters, and widows. [...] I have settled that with God, however. But I have had little if any pleasure from all that I have done, while on the other hand I have had a great deal of worry, anxiety, and trouble."

"They treat me like a fox, a cunning fellow (Schlaukopf) of the first rank. But the truth is that with a gentleman I am always a gentleman and a half, and when I have to do with a pirate, I try to be a pirate and a half."

"I will further every endeavour which positively aims at improving the condition of the working classes. ... As soon as a positive proposal came from the Socialists for fashioning the future in a sensible way, in order that the lot of the working-man might be improved, I would not at any rate refuse to examine it favourably, and I would not even shrink from the idea of State help for the people who would help themselves."

"I leave undecided the question whether complete mutual freedom of international commerce, such as is contemplated by the theory of Free Trade, would not serve the interests of Germany. But as long as most of the countries with which our trade is carried on surround themselves with customs barriers...it does not seem to me justifiable, or to the economic interest of the nation, that we should allow ourselves to be restricted in the satisfaction of our financial wants by the apprehension that German products will thereby be slightly preferred to foreign ones. ... The minority of the population, which does not produce at all, but exclusively consumes, will apparently be injured by a customs system favouring the entire national production. Yet if by means of such a system the aggregate sum of the values produced in the country increase, and thus the national wealth be on the whole enhanced, the non-producing parts of the population...will eventually be benefited."

"In all these questions [of economics] I pay as little regard to science as I do in any other judgment of organic institutions. Our surgery has made splendid progress during the last two thousand years; but medical science has made no progress in regard to the internal conditions of the body, into which the human eye cannot see, and here we stand face to face with the same riddles as before. So it is with the organic formation of States. In this respect the abstract doctrines of science do not influence me: I judge according to the experience which we have. I see that the countries which protect themselves prosper, that the countries which are open are declining, and that great and powerful England, that strong combatant, who, after strengthening her muscles, entered the market and said: “Who will contest with me? I am ready for any one,” is gradually going back to protective duties, and will in a few years adopt them so far as is necessary to preserving at least the English market."

"Let us close our doors and erect somewhat higher barriers and let us thus take care to preserve at least the German market to German industry. The chances of a large export trade are nowadays exceedingly precarious. There are now no more great countries to discover. The globe is circumnavigated, and we can no longer find any large purchasing nations. Commercial treaties, it is true, are under certain circumstances favourable to foreign trade; but whenever a treaty is concluded, it is a question of Qui trompe-t-on ici?—who is taken in? As a rule one of the parties is, but only after a number of years is it known which one."

"Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann."

"For me there has been but one compass, one pole-star, after which I have steered: Salus publica. Since I entered public life I have often, perhaps, acted rashly and imprudently. But when I have had time for reflection I have always been guided by the question,—what is most beneficial, most expedient, and proper for my dynasty so long as I was only in Prussia, and nowadays for the German nation? I have never in my life been doctrinaire. All systems by which parties are divided and bound together are of secondary moment to me. My first thought is of the nation, its position abroad, its independence, our organisation in such a way that we may breathe freely in the world."

"In the development of our tariff I am determined to oppose any modification in the direction of Free Trade, and to use my influence in favour of greater protection and of a higher revenue from frontier duties."

"I should like to see the State, which for the most part consists of Christians—although you reject the name Christian State—penetrated to some extent by the principles of the religion it professes; especially as concerns the help one gives to his neighbour, and sympathy with the lot of old and suffering people."

"I do not comprehend with what right we acknowledge the commands of Christianity as binding upon our private dealings, and yet in the most important sphere of our duty—participation in the legislation of a country having a population of forty-five million people—push them into the background and say, here we need not trouble. For my part I confess openly that my belief in the consequence of our revealed religion, in the form of moral law, is sufficient for me, and certainly for the position taken up on this question by the Emperor, and that the question of the Christian or non-Christian State has nothing to do with the matter. I, the minister of the State, am a Christian, and as such I am determined to act as I believe I am justified before God."

"Many measures which we have adopted to the great blessing of the country are Socialistic, and the State will have to accustom itself to a little more Socialism yet. ... I am glad that this Socialism was adopted, for we have as a consequence secured a free and very well-to-do peasantry, and I hope that we shall in time do something of the sort for the labouring classes. ... The establishment of the freedom of the peasantry was Socialistic; Socialistic, too, is every expropriation in favour of railways; Socialistic to the utmost extent is the aggregation of estates—the law exists in many provinces—taking from one and giving to another, simply because this other can cultivate the land more conveniently; Socialistic is expropriation under the Water Legislation, on account of irrigation, etc., where a man's land is taken away from him because another can farm it better; Socialistic is our entire poor relief, compulsory school attendance, compulsory construction of roads, so that I am bound to maintain a road upon my lands for travellers. That is all Socialistic, and I could extend the register further; but if you believe that you can frighten any one or call up spectres with the word “Socialism,” you take a standpoint which I abandoned long ago, and the abandonment of which is absolutely necessary for our entire imperial legislation."

"I am not antagonistic to the rightful claims of capital; I am far from wanting to flourish a hostile flag; but I am of opinion that the masses, too, have rights which should be considered."

"The whole matter centres in the question, Is it the duty of the State, or is it not, to provide for its helpless citizens? I maintain that it is its duty, that it is the duty not only of the “Christian State,” as I ventured once to call it when speaking of “practical Christianity,” but of every State. It would be foolish for a corporation to undertake matters which the individual can attend to alone; and similarly the purposes which the parish can fulfil with justice and with advantage are left to the parish. But there are purposes which only the State as a whole can fulfil. To these belong national defence, the general system of communications, and, indeed, everything spoken of in article 4 of the constitution. To these, too, belong the help of the necessitous and the removal of those just complaints which provide Social Democracy with really effective material for agitation. This is a duty of the State, a duty which the State cannot permanently disregard."

"If an establishment employing twenty thousand or more workpeople were to be ruined...we could not allow these men to hunger. We should have to resort to real State Socialism and find work for them, and this is what we do in every case of distress. If the objection were right that we should shun State Socialism as we would an infectious disease, how do we come to organise works in one province and another in case of distress—works which we should not undertake if the labourers had employment and wages? In such cases we build railways whose profitableness is questionable; we carry out improvements which otherwise would be left to private initiative. If that is Communism, I have no objection at all to it; though with such catchwords we really get no further."

"Give the working-man the right to work as long as he is healthy, assure him care when he is sick; assure him maintenance when he is old. If you do that, and do not fear the sacrifice, or cry out at State Socialism directly the words “provision for old age” are uttered,—if the State will show a little more Christian solicitude for the working-man, then I believe that the gentlemen of the Wyden (Social-Democratic) programme will sound their bird-call in vain, and that the thronging to them will cease as soon as working-men see that the Government and legislative bodies are earnestly concerned for their welfare."

"Peasants and large landed proprietors recognise more and more that they form one and the same class, the class of land-owners, and follow one and the same industry of agriculture. ... The land-owners are, on the whole, a support of the monarchy, and their entire disposition is favourable to the existing Government; and you try to sow discord amongst them because you are displeased that the unification is proceeding gradually and unceasingly. This is the salutary effect of legislation which at first was painfully felt by many of the privileged class: the abolition of all the legal and axiomatic prerogatives of the greatest land proprietors, and especially of the earlier knighthood. We larger land-owners are in our industry to-day nothing more than the largest peasants, and the peasant is nothing more than the smaller land-owner. Indeed, most peasants call themselves land-owners, while some call themselves husbandmen and others countrymen."

"Wir Deutsche fürchten Gott, aber sonst nichts in der Welt - und die Gottesfurcht ist es schon, die uns den Frieden lieben und pflegen lässt."

"Your map of Africa is really quite nice. But my map of Africa lies in Europe. Here is Russia, and here... is France, and we're in the middle — that's my map of Africa."

"The German who is still free from all Slav or Celtic alloy has a distinctive character and vies with all his equals. When he is allied with other races, provided he has the necessary patience and endurance he always succeeds in becoming, the chief, the directing will, as the husband must be in a household. I have no desire to offend the Slavs, but it is very necessary to recognise that their character has much of the feminine in it: they have charm, intelligence, artifice, address, and often the Germans appear heavy and clumsy beside them. But we always carry the day, and that is why I would like to say to you: when you are doing business with your Slav rivals, even at moments of the most violent anger and in the most critical situations, always retain the profound conviction, the most profound but secret conviction, that you are fundamentally their superiors, and that you always will be so."

"The interests of the state alone have guided me, and it has been a calumny when publicists, even well-meaning, have accused me of having ever advocated an aristocratic system. I have never regarded birth as a substitute for want of ability; whenever I have come forward on behalf of landed property, it has not been in the interests of proprietors of my own class, but because I see in the decline of agriculture one of the greatest dangers to our permanence as a state. The ideal that has always floated before me has been a monarchy which should be so far controlled by an independent national representation—according to my notion, representing classes or callings—that monarch or parliament would not be able to alter the existing statutory position before the law separately but only communi consensu; with publicity, and public criticism, by press and Diet, of all political proceedings."

"I received the first intelligence of the events of March 18 and 19, 1848, while staying with my neighbour, Count Wartensleben, at Karow. ... I thought the King would soon be master of the situation if only he were free; I saw that the first thing to be done was to liberate him, as he was said to be in the power of the insurgents. On the 20th I was told by the peasants at Schönhausen that a deputation had arrived from Tangermünde with a demand that the black, red, and gold flag should be hoisted on the tower, as had already been done in the above-named town; threatening, in case of refusal, to visit us again with reinforcements. I asked the peasants if they were willing to defend themselves. They replied with a unanimous and brisk “Yes,” and I advised them to drive the townspeople out of the village; which was attended to, the women zealously co-operating. I then had a white banner with a black cross in the shape of the , which happened to be in the church, hoisted on the tower, and ascertained what supply of weapons and ammunition was available in the village."

"I went the round of the villages and found the peasants already eager to march to the help of the King in Berlin. Especially enthusiastic was an old dyke-surveyor named Krause of Neuermark, who had been a sergeant in my father's regiment of carabineers. Only my next-door neighbour sympathised with the Berlin movement, accused me of hurling a firebrand into the country, and declared that if the peasants really prepared to march off, he would come forward and dissuade them. I replied, “You know that I am a quiet man, but if you do that I shall shoot you.” “I am sure you won't,” said he. “I give you my word of honour that I will,” I replied, “and you know that I keep my word: so drop that.”"

"I immediately went quite alone to Potsdam, where, in the railway station, I saw Herr von Bodelschwingh. ... It was plain that he had no desire to be seen in conversation with me, the reactionary. He returned my greeting in French, with the words, “Do not speak to me.” “The peasants are rising in our part,” I replied. “For the King?” “Yes.” “That rope-dancer!” said he, pressing his hands to his eyes while the tears stood in them. ... I [then] visited in the ‘Deutsches Haus’ General von Mollendorf, whom I found still stiff from the treatment he had suffered when negotiating with the insurgents, and General von Prittwitz, who had been in command in Berlin. I described to them the present temper of the country people. ... Prittwitz, who was older than I, and judged more calmly, said: “Send us none of your peasants, we don't want them. We have quite enough soldiers. Either send us potatoes and corn, perhaps money too, for I do not know whether the maintenance and pay of the troops will be sufficiently provided for. If auxiliaries came up I should receive, and should have to carry out, an order from Berlin to drive them back.” “Then fetch the King away,” I said. He replied: “There will be no great difficulty about that; I am strong enough to take Berlin, but that means more fighting. What can we do after the King has commanded us to play the part of the vanquished? I cannot attack without orders.”"

"It was not then possible to forecast with certainty whether and how long the Czar's friendship would remain a realisable political asset. In any case, however, simple common sense enjoined us not to let it fall into the possession of our enemies, whom we might discern in the Poles, the philo-Polish Russians, and, ultimately, probably in the French."

"An agreement between Russia and the German foe of for joint action, military and political, against the Polish ‘Bruderstamm’ movement was a decisive blow to the views of the philo-Polish party at the Russian court. ... The convention said ‘checkmate’ in the game which anti-Polish monarchism was then playing against philo-Polish Panslavism within the Russian cabinet."

"Even in 1864 it certainly cost us much trouble to loosen the threads by which the King, with the co-operation of the Liberalising influence of his consort, remained attached to that camp. Without having investigated the complicated legal questions of the succession, he stuck to his motto: “I have no right to Holstein.” ... At that time, however, the acquisition of the duchies by Prussia was regarded as an act of profligacy by all those who, since 1848, had set up to play the part of representatives of national views. My respect for so-called public opinion—or, in other words, the clamour of orators and newspapers—has never been very great, but was still further materially lowered as regards foreign policy in the two cases compared above. How strangely, up to this time, the King's way of looking at things was impregnated with vagabond Liberalism through the influence of his consort and of the pushing Bethmann-Hollweg clique."

"A decision, memorable in the world's history, of the secular struggle between the two neighbouring peoples [France and Germany] was at stake [in 1870], and in danger of being ruined, through personal and predominantly female influences with no historical justification, influences which owed their efficacy, not to political considerations but to feelings which the terms humanity and civilisation, imported to us from England, still rouse in German natures. ... [I]f the conclusion of the French war had been a little less favourable to Germany, then would this mighty war, with its victories and its enthusiasm, have remained without the effect it produced on our national unification. I never doubted that the victory over France must precede the restoration of the German kingdom, and if we did not succeed in bringing it this time to a perfect conclusion, further wars without the preliminary security of our perfect unification were full in view."

"Austria was no more in the wrong in opposing our claims than we were in making them."

"A statesman cannot create anything himself. He must wait and listen until he hears the steps of God sounding through events; then leap up and grasp the hem of His garment."

"I have always found the word Europe on the lips of those politicians who wanted something from other Powers which they dared not demand in their own names."

"Struggle is everywhere, without struggle no life, and if we want to go on living, we must be ready for further struggles."

"I have never judged international disputes by the standards which prevail at a student's duel."

"In the domain of political economy the abstract doctrines of science leave me perfectly cold, my only standard of judgment being experience."

"If we really came to a position in which we could no longer produce the grain which we must necessarily consume, then in what state would we be if in wartime we had no Russian grain imports and perhaps simultaneously were blockaded along our coasts – in other words, if we had no grain at all?"

"Concerning the blunders which had been made in our foreign policy public opinion is, as a rule, first enlightened when it is in a position to look back upon the history of a generation, and the Achivi qui plectuntur are not always immediately contemporary with the mistaken actions."

"Every state must be aware that its peace, its security rests on its own sword."

"Who is master of Bohemia is master of Europe."

"Crowned heads, wealth and privilege may well tremble should ever again the Black and Red unite!"

"Europe today is a powder keg and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal … A single spark will set off an explosion that will consume us all … I cannot tell you when that explosion will occur, but I can tell you where … Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans will set it off."

"There is a special providence for drunkards, fools, and the United States of America."

"Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made (Gesetze sind wie Würste, man sollte besser nicht dabei sein, wenn sie gemacht werden)."

"At no time there is more lying than before the elections, during the war and after the hunt. (Original: "Es wird niemals so viel gelogen wie vor der Wahl, während des Krieges und nach der Jagd.")"

"I am firmly convinced that Spain is the strongest country of the world. Century after century trying to destroy herself and still no success"

"Put all the Dutch people in Ireland, and Ireland would be the garden of Europe. Put all the Irish people in the Netherlands, and it would sink."

"Mr Balfour was very interesting on what he considers the great gulf between Bismarck and the present rulers of Germany, not only in strategy but ambition. Bismarck, he is certain, would never have staked his country on the chances of this war—even though they may have been five to four at the outset—and in his opinion Bismarck would never have hankered after "world empire". All he wanted was the unity of the German Empire and commercial prosperity which they were peacefully enjoying before this desperate sort of "double or quits" gamble."

"When asked what was the greatest political fact of modern times, Bismarck is reported to have responded, that it was "the inherited and permanent fact that North America speaks English." Whether the saying be authentic or not, the remark is certainly worthy of its reputed author's keen insight into political fundamentals."

"The great European figures of the later nineteenth century were Disraeli and Bismarck, who strove to weld together the "two nations" into one through the agencies of the social service state, popular education and imperialism, refuted the taunt that "the worker has no country", and paved the way for "national labour", "national socialism" and even "national communism"."

"Bismarck soars above all: he is six foot four I shd. think, proportionately stout; with a sweet and gentle voice, and with a peculiarly refined enunciation, wh. singularly and strangely contrasts with the awful things he says: appalling from their frankness and their audacity. He is a complete despot here, and from the highest to the lowest of the Prussians, and all the permanent foreign diplomacy, tremble at his frown and court most sedulously his smile. He loads me with kindnesses, and, tho' often preoccupied, with an immediate dissolution of Parliament on his hands, an internecine war with the Socialists, 100's of whom he puts daily into prison in defiance of all law, he yesterday exacted from me a promise that, before I depart, I will once more dine with him quite alone. His palace has large and beautiful gardens. He has never been out since I came here, except the memorable day when he called on me to ascertain whe[the]r my policy was an ultimatum. I convinced him it was, and the Russians surrendered a few hours afterwards."

"He asked me today whether racing was still much encouraged in England. I replied never more so; that when I was young, tho' there were numerous race meetings, they were at intervals and sometimes long intervals—Epsom, Ascot, Doncaster, Goodwood—and Newmarket frequently; but now there were races throughout the year—it might be said, every day of the year—and all much attended. "Then," cried the Prince eagerly, "there never will be Socialism in England. You are a happy country. You are safe, as long as the people are devoted to racing. Here a gentleman cannot ride down the street without twenty persons saying to themselves, or each other, 'Why has that fellow a horse, and I have not one?' In England the more horses a nobleman has, the more popular he is. So long as the English are devoted to racing, Socialism has no chance with you." This will give you a slight idea of the style of his conversation. His views on all subjects are original, but there is no strain, no effort at paradox. He talks as Montaigne writes. When he heard about Cyprus, he said: "You have done a wise thing. This is progress. It will be popular; a nation likes progress." His idea of progress was evidently seizing something. He said he looked upon our relinquishment of the Ionian Isles as the first sign of our decadence. Cyprus put us all right again."

"Is it wrong to begin with Bismarck? On several levels, he was a key figure in the coming of the Third Reich. For one thing, the cult of his memory in the years after his death encouraged many Germans to long for the return of the strong leadership his name represented. For another, his actions and policies in the mid-to-late nineteenth century helped create an ominous legacy for the German future. Yet in many ways he was a complex and contradictory figure, as much European as German, as much modern as traditional. Here, too, his example pointed forwards to the tangled mixture of the new and the old that was so characteristic of the Third Reich. It is worth calling to mind that a mere fifty years separated Bismarck's foundation of the German Empire in 1871 from the electoral triumphs of the Nazis in 1930-32. That there was a connection between the two seems impossible to deny. It was here, rather than in the remote religious cultures and hierarchical polities of the Reformation or the 'Enlightened Absolutism' of the eighteenth century, that we find the first real moment in German history which it is possible to relate directly to the coming of the Third Reich in 1933."

"The great statesman has always used tariffs deliberately. It is only when political energy is dead that people refer to them as expedients. Bismarck understood the subject at a time when the mind of the Englishman was becoming confused. Like all statesmen he asked himself first where he was going, and secondly what was his object in arriving. He knew that trade could be raised to any state of artificiality if it could be controlled within a self-sufficient unit. Although he did not possess such a unit he was not frustrated, and counted on an armed conquest at some future date... In 1834 he used Free Trade to unify Germany by the Zollverein. The same policy used Protection to encourage intensively the larger unit of the Nation. Here was an example of the use of each system according to the end in view and proof of the subservience of economics to the politic will."

"Otto von Bismarck was no social reformer in the Frances Perkins mold. His motives were defensive. He feared that the public would turn to the revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels unless the German government intervened. Bismarck hoped his welfare provisions would be just generous enough to keep the public quiescent. That is a time-honored political tactic: when the Roman emperor Trajan distributed free grain, the poet Juvenal famously grumbled that citizens could be bought off by “bread and circuses.” You could tell much the same story about Italy’s welfare state, which took shape in the 1930s as the fascist Mussolini tried to undercut the popular appeal of his socialist opponents."

"He trusted to the levelling effect of time and to the pressure exercised by the process of evolution, the steady action of which appeared more effective than an attempt to break the resistance which the individual states offered at the moment. By this policy he showed his great ability in the art of statesmanship. And, as a matter of fact, the sovereignty of the Reich has continually increased at the cost of the sovereignty of the individual states."

"For nearly twenty years, Bismarck preserved the peace and eased international tension with his moderation and flexibility. But he paid the price of misunderstood greatness, for his successors and would-be imitators could draw no better lesson from his example than multiplying arms and waging a war which would cause the suicide of European civilization."

"The sharp down-turn in the European economy in the 1870s had produced in most advanced economies save Britain a 'return to protection', marked especially by Bismarck's split with the Liberals, his imposition of protective tariffs in 1879, and the development in the Second Reich of a political economy of cartelization married to harrying the trade unions and suppressing the S.P.D. For those who wished an alternative to the British liberal state, here was one, with all its implications and consequences. Few, of course, advocated out-and-out Germanization, but increasingly Germany was coming to be regarded as the alternative model, the seed-bed for the future."

"The prototype of localized imperialism is to be found in the monarchical policies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries... In the nineteenth century, Bismarck was the master of this imperialistic policy which seeks to overthrow the status quo and to establish political preponderance within self-chosen limits. The difference between such a localized imperialistic policy, continental imperialism, and unlimited imperialism is the difference between the foreign policies of Bismarck, William II, and Hitler. Bismarck wanted to establish Germany's preponderance in Central Europe; William II, in all of Europe; Hitler, in the whole world."

"In the nineteenth century, the element of choice characteristic of the policy of localized imperialism is paramount in the history of Bismarck's foreign policy. First, he had to overcome the opposition of the Prussian conservatives who favored a policy of the status quo for Prussia over Bismarck's policy of localized imperialism aiming at hegemony within Germany. When victorious wars had made Bismarck's policy feasible, it had to be defended against those who now wanted to go beyond the limits which Bismarck had set for Prussian and later German hegemony. The dismissal of Bismarck by William II in 1890 marked the end of localized and the beginning of at least a tendency toward continental imperialism as the foreign policy of Germany."

"The era of Bismarck (1861-90) saw the Concert of Europe at its best. In two decades immediately following Germany's rise to the status of a Great Power, she was the chief beneficiary of the peace interest. She had forced her way into the front ranks at the cost of Austria and France; it was to her advantage to maintain the status quo and to prevent a war which could be only a war of revenge against herself. Bismarck deliberately fostered the notion of peace as a common venture of the Powers, and avoided commitments which might force Germany out of the position of a peace Power. He opposed expansionist ambitions in the Balkans or overseas; he used the free trade weapon consistently against Austria, and even against France; he thwarted Russia's and Austria's Balkan ambitions with the help of the balance-of-power game, thus keeping in with potential allies and averting situations which might involve Germany in war. The scheming aggressor of 1863-70 turned into the honest broker of 1878, and the deprecator of colonial adventures. He consciously took the lead in what he felt to be the peaceful trend of the time in order to serve Germany's national interests."

"According...to our Individualist and Free Trade friends, Prince Bismarck ought to have come to the conclusion that German industries were from "natural causes" unfit as compared to their British rivals; that they could never hope to hold their own in the struggle for existence, and that it would be cheaper to buy in the British market. That great statesman, who was never deceived either by the ideologues of Individualism or the ideologues of Socialism, saw very clearly that though this might be the case for the moment it need not be the case in all perpetuity, but that to give way for the moment was to give way for ever. English goods might beat German goods for the given year, but granted a tariff and the encouragement of State-aid, German goods might be beating British in under a quarter of a century. The static comparison was against the German Empire, but the dynamic impulse given to German industry by the tariff of 1878 has carried her right to the front, and the result of the policy has been of enormous profit to the German exchequer."

"Let us celebrate Bismarck's memory by making the great idea of his life, devotion to the Fatherland, the guiding star of our own lives. Each of us in the place where he can do his best work. Each of us is responsible for helping the country rise again to that greatness for which Bismarck, who also knew an Olmuetz, prepared the way."

"Bismarck had never been liberal in thought, though sometimes in action. For him the state, not the individual, was the mainspring of political action; and he did not accept the "night-watchman" theory of the state which was common to all liberals. He held that the state could lead in economic affairs, just as he had tried to take the initiative in foreign policy and not wait upon events."

"The real hit of the congress was the personal tie between Bismarck and Beaconsfield. No doubt Bismarck flattered "the old Jew" in order to extract concessions for Russia's benefit. But the mutual affection was genuine. The two men recognised their common qualities... Each admired the actor in the other, and characteristically each noted the beauty of the other's voice. Both had the brooding melancholy of the Romantic movement in its Byronic phase; both had broken into the charmed circle of privilege—Bismarck as a boorish Junker, Disraeli as a Jew; both had a profound contempt for political moralising. Was it Disraeli or Bismarck who said of himself: "My temperament is dreamy and sentimental. People who paint me all make the mistake of giving me a violent expression"? Was it Disraeli or Bismarck who said on becoming prime minister: "Well, I've climbed to the top of the greasy pole"? In politics both men had used universal suffrage to ruin liberalism or, in the English phrase, "to dish the Whigs". Both genuinely advocated social reform; Disraeli had once defended protective tariffs. Both used foreign success to strengthen their position at home. When Bismarck was told of the British occupation of Cyprus, he exclaimed: "This is progress! It will be popular: a nation loves progress!" Beaconsfield was annoyed at having the words taken out of his mouth and commented sourly: "His idea of progress obviously consists in taking something from somebody else"—an idea which Beaconsfield had made the basis of Tory policy."

"Fifty years ago Bismarck was admired as the great nationalist and revolutionary; now he is held up as the man who sought to preserve Europe's traditional civilisation. Both pictures are true, though of different times. All revolutionaries become conservative once they are in power; and Bismarck had always longed for tranquillity even when he was a revolutionary."

"His speeches are among the greatest literary compositions in the German language, despite their repetitions and their clumsy, fragmentary phrases."

"It would be unfair to say that Bismarck took up social welfare solely to weaken the Social Democrats; he had had it in mind for a long time, and believed in it deeply. But as usual he acted on his beliefs at the exact moment when they served a practical need. Challenge drove him forward. He first avowed his social programme when Bebel taunted him with his old friendship with Lassalle. He answered by calling himself a Socialist, indeed a more practical Socialist than the Social Democrats... The system of Social Insurance which Bismarck inaugurated in 1881 and completed in 1889 just before his fall would be enough to establish his reputation as a constructive statesman even if he had done nothing else... German social insurance was the first in the world, and has served as a model for every other civilised country."

"I found Bismarck's personality fascinating...and he became one of the few I should like to recall from the dead."

"It's hard to be emperor under such a chancellor."

"Erst erfreuen, dann belehren."

"Indifference to the fine arts comes close to barbarism."

"I hope I may be allowed to remark that recent inventions and improvements enabling works of art to be duplicated faithfully, easily, and safely may properly be used to give industry a direction in which beauty is as important as utility. I cannot, as many do, regret the mechanical process that turns the artist's attention increasingly towards the intellectual element in the production of a work of art; something that no machinery can replace. Anything that a machine can imitate and duplicate perfectly is no longer in the realm of art. But as a work of art can be mechanically duplicated both faithfully and with ease, and this distributed to all classes of society, if the knowledge of that work need no longer be acquired solely in museums or in those private collections to which access is difficult, then we may hope that here and there one of the seeds thus broadcast will take root and eventually bear fruit."

"Schinkel's aesthetic was not a crudely materialistic "truth to material" affair… but rather an attempt to inform iron and other industrial materials with an appropriate beauty through the direct collaboration of the artist in the manufacturing process."

"Schinkel was not arbitrary in his use of historical modes but rather eclectic in the best sense of the word. He could search the past for its conspicuous successes using them both freely and discursively as the basis for a contemporary architecture."

"Schinkel had asserted that architecture should be the expression of an idea, and, that insofar as it represented a transcendence of the intellectual over purely material considerations, the Gothic style was the best example of an architectural expression of ideas. Yet, as it happened over the next several generations Gothic was capable of expressing a variety of ideas, often contradictory. It could, for example, express the ultimate victory of spirit over matter, an architectural system "organically" related to nature, or the most logical and efficient use of masonry. It was both the visible expression of the Germanic soul and an ideal vehicle for Catholic worship. If similar forms could express such a variety of ideas, was it also possible that a variety of forms could express similar ideas? That meaning was not intrinsic in the forms but rather attached to them by tacit agreement and confirmed by the specific context? Although it is true that the Gothic Monument to the Wars of Liberation was in a "national" style while the Museum dedicated to universal cultural history was in a timeless "international" style, there is also the particular location of each building to consider: a suburban hilltop for the former and the center of the city with its monumental classical buildings for the latter. Schinkel approached each particular problem on its own terms, and this freedom from a self-consistent but doctrinaire method contributed to his success as a practicing architect even if it makes it difficult to reconstruct his "theory of architecture.""

"Ironically, the belief that the new age was essentially different from the past led to the emotional need to find "roots" in the past, to find some continuity with man's great achievements of the past. The unprecedented nature of so many of the architectural tasks and the altered conditions for their realization inevitably produced originality at the level of planning and construction; but as the Romantic architect and, indeed, sensible men realized, man is an emotional creature who needs to be reassured by the familiar and the intelligible. It is a measure of Schinkel's genius that he could provide such functional solutions to particular problems, clothe them in intelligible and expressive forms, incorporate them so felicitously into their environment, and make it all seem so natural and inevitable."

"You cannot wage war with sentimentality. The more ruthlessly war is conducted, the more merciful is it in fact, for it finishes the war the sooner."

"Fundamentally, Britain is responsible for the war. She was jealous. British business men wanted this war. It is a British business war. ... We have no dislike for France, nor Russia. We think highly of the French. But Britain! We hate Britain!"

"I need them for the manoeuvring of my left wing in the next war."

"1866 was a duel between two gentlemen; in 1870-71 we were obliged to chastise an impudent street arab; but to-day we must knock down a scoundrel."

"In consequence of the disaster on the Macedonian front, with its attendant weakening of the reserves of the West front, and in consequence of the impossibility of replacing the great losses sustained in the recent encounters, there is now, humanly speaking, no longer any possibility of our being able to impose peace on the enemy. Our opponents are constantly receiving reinforcements; the old elements of our Army still hold together, and may still offer some resistance to renewed attacks of the enemy, but our situation is becoming very precarious, and may at any moment place the Army Command under the necessity of taking a comprehensive decision. In these circumstances, it is imperative to cease the struggle in order to save the German people and our allies from unnecessary sacrifices. Every day's loss in this respect costs the lives of thousands of German soldiers."

"If I address the following lines to you, I do so because I am credibly informed that you, like myself, as a true German, love your fatherland before everything, putting aside personal opinions and wishes, as I have had to do in order to help my country in its hour of need. In this spirit I have joined forces with you to rescue our people from a threatening collapse. ... The fate of the German people has been laid in your hands. Upon your determination it will depend whether the German Reich acquires a new impetus. I am ready, and behind me stand the whole Army, to support you unreservedly. We all know that after this lamentable upshot of the war, the reconstruction of the realm can only be effected upon new foundations and in new forms."

"In case of a resumption of hostilities we are militarily in a position to reconquer, in the east, the province of Posen and to defend our frontier. In the west, we cannot, in view of the numerical superiority of the Entente and its ability to surround us on both flanks, count on repelling successfully a determined attack of our enemies. A favorable outcome of our operations is therefore very doubtful, but as a soldier I would rather perish in honor than sign a humiliating peace."

"An English general has said, with justice: ‘The German Army was stabbed in the back.’ No blame is to be attached to the sound core of the Army. Its performances call, like that of the officer corps, for our equal admiration. It is perfectly plain on whom the blame rests. If any further proof were necessary to show it, it is to be found in the statement made by the British general and in the utter amazement of our enemies at their victory."

"I was never able to understand how it was that here and there the welfare of the Fatherland had to be sacrificed to mere petty party interests, and from the point of view of political conviction felt myself most at home in the shade of that tree which was firmly rooted in the ethico-political soil of the epoch of our great and venerable Emperor. That epoch, with what I regarded as its wonderful glories, seemed to have become part of me, and I adhered firmly to its ideals and principles. The course of events in the present war have hardly been of a kind to make me particularly enthusiastic about the developments of later times. A powerful, self-contained State in Bismarck's sense was the world in which I preferred my thoughts to move. Discipline and hard work within the Fatherland seemed to me better than cosmopolitan imaginings. Moreover, I fail to see that any citizen has rights on whom equal duties are not imposed."

"You are all young men and you have played to me the “March of Entry into Paris” well. But I hope that one day you will be playing this military march where you should, at the same spot where I was in 1870."

"Prosperity can come through peace alone. The German people are in favor of all possible means to make war impossible. I have seen three wars. A man who has seen three wars never will wish another war. He must be a friend of peace. But I am not a pacifist. All my impressions of war are so bad that I could be for it only under the sternest necessity — the necessity of fighting Bolshevism or of defending one's country."

"Interview of 1929, as quoted in "Nations are greatly concerned over death of German President" in Berkeley Daily Gazette (1 August 1934)"

"I have always been a Monarchist. In sentiment I still am. Now it is too late for me to change. But it is not for me to say that the new way is not the better way, the right way. So it may prove to be."

"Recently, a whole series of cases has been reported to me in which judges, lawyers, and officials of the Judiciary who are disabled war veterans and whose record in office is flawless, have been forcibly sent on leave, and are later to be dismissed for the sole reason that they are of Jewish descent. It is quite intolerable for me personally…that Jewish officials who were disabled in the war should suffer such treatment, [especially] as, with the express approval of the government, I addressed a Proclamation to the German people on the day of the national uprising, March 21st, in which I bowed in reverence before the dead of the war and remembered in gratitude the bereaved families of the war dead, the disabled, and my old comrades at the front. I am certain, Mr. Chancellor, that you share this human feeling, and request you, most cordially and urgently, to look into this matter yourself, and to see to it that there is some uniform arrangement for all branches of the public service in Germany. As far as my own feelings are concerned, officials, judges, teachers and lawyers who are war invalids, fought at the front, are sons of war dead, or themselves lost sons in the war should remain in their positions unless an individual case gives reason for different treatment. If they were worthy of fighting for Germany and bleeding for Germany, then they must also be considered worthy of continuing to serve the Fatherland in their professions."

"I thank Providence for allowing me, in the evening of my life, to see the hour of recuperation. I thank all those who, with selfless patriotism, have collaborated in Germany’s resurgence. My Chancellor Adolf Hitler and his movement have made a decisive step towards the great goal of bringing the German people together to an inner unity above all differences of rank and class. I know that much remains to be done and I wish with all my heart that, behind the act of national resurgence and national coalescence, there should be an act of conciliation comprising the entire German Fatherland. ... I say farewell to my German people in the firm hope that that for which I longed in the year 1919 and which by a slow maturing process led to 30 January 1933, will mature to the complete fulfilment and consummation of the historic mission of our people. In this firm faith in the future of the Fatherland I am content to close my eyes!"

"In the middle of August I did not consider that the time had come for us to despair of a successful conclusion of the war. In spite of certain distressing but isolated occurrences in the last battle, I certainly hoped that the Army would be in a position to continue to hold out. I fully realised what the homeland had already borne in the way of sacrifices and privations and what they would possibly still have to bear."

"In the Great War ledger, the page on which the Russian losses were written has been torn out. No one knows the figure. Five or eight Million?"

"All we know is that, sometimes, in our battles with the Russians, we had to remove the mounds of enemy corpses from before our trenches, in order to get a clear field of fire against fresh assaulting waves."

"The name Hindenburg is the terror of our enemies and electrifies our army and our people, who have boundless faith in him."

"Criticism of Hindenburg, Papen, and Schleicher cannot, therefore, be justly based on the accusation that they intentionally brought Hitler to total power, but it must be limited to the charge that their dilettante methods resulted in bringing about precisely what they had wanted to avoid. It is not evil intent but political folly that they may be reproached for—the imprudence of political dilettantes let loose on Germany at Germany’s expense, combined with breach of the Constitution, with weakness of character in critical situations, and with a more than average self-confidence, in Papen’s case based on a strange mixture of piety and personal vanity."

"The real surprise was not Hindenburg’s victory, which in view of the lack of pro-democratic majorities was quite logical, in case the Communists abstained. The real surprise came later. It was the unexpected fact that Hindenburg subjected himself quite loyally to the Weimar Constitution and maintained this attitude unhesitantly during his first term in office. Both sides had expected his support for right-wing attempts to restore the monarchy, to abolish the colors of the democratic republic in favor of the former black-white-red, to reduce the rights of the working classes, to reintroduce more patriarchal conditions. The great surprise—disappointment on the one side, relief on the other—was that he did not do any of this. During the election campaign he said that now he had read the Constitution for the first time and had found it quite good. “If duty requires that I act as President on the basis of the Constitution, without regard to party, person, or origin, I shall not fail.” Campaign promises are often mere sedatives; no one trusts them. But the Field Marshall kept his for seven years. He swore an oath to the Constitution before the Reichstag. He had the black-red-gold standard fly above his palace and on his car and made no attempt to show the black-white-red colors instead. He made no step toward a monarchistic restoration. He performed his presidential functions conscientiously in the manner prescribed by the Constitution. During the first five years, he did not even once make use of the President’s emergency power under article 48, as Ebert, much to Hindenburg’s annoyance, had done repeatedly, and then did so only at Chancellor Brüning’s request. For seven years he dismissed and appointed chancellors in strict accordance with the Constitution without regard to his personal preferences; the Social Democrat Hermann Müller was chancellor under him for two years (1928–1930). He signed all acts passed by the Reichstag, whether or not he liked them, even the first extension of the Act for the Protection of the Republic in 1927, though with a little grumble about the paragraph on the further exile of former royal families, the “Kaiser-Paragraph.”"

"Four points about the election of Hindenburg are worth stressing. First, there was a close correlation between the electorate which voted for Hindenburg in 1925 and those who supported the National Socialists in September 1930 and July 1932. Second, both the election and Hindenburg Day took on counter-symbolic importance, underlining the fact that the ‘Reds’ were no longer masters of the streets, but could be challenged and defeated, not least by the Stahlhelm, with its sizable following of workers. Third, rightist activism had no consolidated political home, since the conservative nationalists and right liberals could not co-operate with each other, their leaders – Stresemann and Hindenburg – being personally antagonistic. And finally, although Hindenburg promised to uphold the constitution, his election meant a return to influence, often exercised through backstairs channels, of the armed forces and major landowners, for the new President was very much one of their own. Germany’s anti-democratic elites were back in business."

"The victors imposed upon the Germans all the long-sought ideals of the liberal nations of the West. They were relieved from the burden of compulsory military service and from the need of keeping up heavy armaments. The enormous American loans were presently pressed upon them, though they had no credit. A democratic constitution, in accordance with all the latest improvements, was established at Weimar. Emperors having been driven out, nonentities were elected. Beneath this flimsy fabric raged the passions of the mighty, defeated, but substantially uninjured German nation. The prejudice of the Americans against monarchy, which Mr. Lloyd George made no attempt to counteract, had made it clear to the beaten Empire that it would have better treatment from the Allies as a republic than as a monarchy. Wise policy would have crowned and fortified the Weimar Republic with a constitutional sovereign in the person of an infant grandson of the Kaiser, under a council of regency. Instead, a gaping void was opened in the national life of the German people. All the strong elements, military and feudal, which might have rallied to a constitutional monarchy and for its sake respected and sustained the new democratic and parliamentary processes, were for the time being unhinged. The Weimar Republic, with all its liberal trappings and blessings, was regarded as an imposition of the enemy. It could not hold the loyalties or the imagination of the German people. For a spell they sought to cling as in desperation to the aged Marshal Hindenburg. Thereafter mighty forces were adrift; the void was open, and into that void after a pause there strode a maniac of ferocious genius, the repository and expression of the most virulent hatreds that have ever corroded the human breast – Corporal Hitler."

"These achievements made the reputation of Hindenburg as a virtually invincible general. A cult of the hero quickly developed around him, and his massive, stolid presence seemed to provide an element of stability amid the changing fortunes of the war. But he was in fact a man of limited political vision and ability. He acted in many ways as a front for his energetic subordinate Ludendorff, whose ideas about the conduct of the war were far more radical and ruthless than his own. The pair's triumphs in the East contrasted sharply with the stalemate in the West, where within a few months of the outbreak of war, some eight million troops were facing each other along 450 miles of trenches from the North Sea to the Swiss border, unable to penetrate to a meaningful degree into the enemy lines."

"Once in office, and influenced by his strong sense of duty, Hindenburg, to the surprise of many, stuck to the letter of the constitution; but, as his seven-year term of office wore on, and he moved into his eighties, he became ever more impatient with the complexities of political events and ever more susceptible to the influence of his inner circle of advisers, all of whom shared his instinctive belief that the monarchy was the only legitimate sovereign power in the German Reich. Persuaded by the correctness of the use of Presidential emergency powers by the example of his predecessor, Hindenburg began to feel that a conservative dictatorship exercised in his name was the only way out of the crisis into which the Republic fell at the beginning of the 1930s. Whatever influence Hindenburg's election might therefore have had in reconciling opponents of the Republic to its existence in the short run, in the long run it was an unmitigated disaster for Weimar democracy. By 1930 at the latest, it had become clear that the Presidential power was in the hands of a man who had no faith in democratic institutions and no intention of defending them from its enemies."

"Elections in July 1932 saw the Nazi vote soar above 37 per cent. True, it fell back to 33 per cent when new elections were held in November, not least because signs of economic recovery were at last manifesting themselves, but the party's entitlement to form a government was by now hard to dispute since it was still easily the biggest grouping in the Reichstag. Ever the schemer, Papen now persuaded Hindenburg to dump Schleicher and, against the President's better judgement, to appoint Hitler to lead a coalition with the conservative German Nationalist Party - the only party except for the Communists to gain significant numbers of new votes in the November election. Hitler duly became Chancellor on January 30, 1933. Thus did German democracy wreak its own destruction. Given the paralysing enmity between the Social Democrats and the Communists, the only way to avoid the Third Reich would have been if Hindenburg himself had shut down the Reichstag and banned the Nazis, an option he does not seem to have contemplated."

"In the year 1925, General Field Marshall von Hindenburg became president of the republic. With this imperial soldier, who personified for the great masses of Volk the experience of the Great War, the democracy of Weimar garnered its first pillar of moral authority. With it also disappeared, however, the last possibility for toppling the state of Weimar illegally and by force. The only possibility left was to overpower it by legal means."

"He is not only a monarchist, but in the true sense of honorable old Prussianism a Royalist. The splendor of the Borusso-militaristic Hohenzollern Reich is to him the highest reason of the world's creation. Arts, sciences and politics are as far removed from him as Mount Athos from Hanover."

"In these hours of overwhelming concern for the existence and the future of the German nation, the venerable World War leader appealed to us men of the nationalist parties and associations to fight under him again as once we did at the front, but now loyally united for the salvation of the Reich at home. The revered President of the Reich having with such generosity joined hands with us in a common pledge, we nationalist leaders would vow before God, our conscience and our people that we shall doggedly and with determination fulfill the mission entrusted to us as the National Government. It is an appalling inheritance which we are taking over."

"And why had the German people failed to see through Hitler before 1933? Oughtn’t so early an event as the Munich Putsch have shown them what he was? Why, instead of upholding and nurturing the German Republic, the one gratifying consequence of the First World War, had they been almost unanimous in sabotaging it, voting for Hindenburg and later for Hitler, under whom, to be sure, it became very dangerous to behave like a decent human being?"

"The mass of the [German] nation...swung round to the deepest distrust of those who had hitherto been their idols—especially of Ludendorff, whom they dissociated from Hindenburg and recognised as the man who had dominated German policy during the latter part of the War, whereas Hindenburg rather embodied the nation's patriotic spirit. In this connection it is interesting to recall a comment made by Marshal Foch, when I asked him his opinion in June 1918 about the two outstanding German military leaders. What, I said, did he think of Ludendorff? His reply was: “Un bon soldat!” And how, I continued, would he describe Hindenburg? He answered: “Un grand patriote!”"

"Field Marshal von Hindenburg has forfeited the right to wear the field grey uniform of the army and to be buried in it. Herr Paul von Hindenburg has destroyed the very thing he fought for as Field Marshal."

"Thus was the German Republic born, as if by a fluke. If the Socialists themselves were not staunch republicans it could hardly be expected that the conservatives would be. But the latter had abdicated their responsibility. They and the Army leaders, Ludendorff and Hindenburg, had pushed political power into the hands of the reluctant Social Democrats. In doing so they managed also to place on the shoulders of these democratic working-class leaders apparent responsibility for signing the surrender and ultimately the peace treaty, thus laying on them the blame for Germany’s defeat and for whatever suffering a lost war and a dictated peace might bring upon the German people. This was a shabby trick, one which the merest child would be expected to see through, but in Germany it worked. It doomed the Republic from the start."

"The political power in Germany no longer resided, as it had since the birth of the Republic, in the people and in the body which expressed the people’s will, the Reichstag. It was now concentrated in the hands of a senile, eighty-five-year-old President and in those of a few shallow ambitious men around him who shaped his weary, wandering mind. Hitler saw this very clearly, and it suited his purposes. It seemed most unlikely that he would ever win a majority in Parliament. Hindenburg’s new course offered him the only opportunity that was left of coming to power. Not at the moment, to be sure, but soon."

"Hindenburg represents to us timelessness, history, myth, and national faith, so that the task of national leaders can only consist in utilizing as a specific Hindenburg faith the moral strength which he represents in their own work. The quarrel about Hindenburg cannot help us. We can progress only inspired by a sincere, humble, dynamic faith in Hindenburg. And the nation is going to follow whoever, inspired by this faith in Hindenburg, will renew and reshape that Prussia and that Germany which is shiningly reflected in Hindenburg."

"I hope that you will be in agreement with me when I beg you to do everything possible to prevent Hindenburg's retirement. We must under no circumstances bear the responsibility before the bar of history for having overthrown Hindenburg. I feel that even the abdication of the Kaiser would be easier to bear than the retirement of Hindenburg."

"To the public the savior of East Prussia was the nominal commander, Hindenburg. The elderly general dragged from retirement in his old blue uniform was transformed into a titan by the victory. The triumph in East Prussia, lauded and heralded even beyond its true proportions, fastened the Hindenburg myth upon Germany. Not even Hoffmann's sly malice could penetrate it. When, as Chief of Staff on the Eastern Front later in the war, he would take visitors over the field of Tannenberg, Hoffmann would tell them: "This is where the Field Marshal slept before the battle, this is where he slept after the battle; here is where he slept during the battle.""

""The marshal and the corporal are standing alongside us, struggling for peace and egalitarianism"."

"Weimar’s demise was, in the final accounting, the result of a conspiracy of a small group of powerful men around the president who conspired to place Adolf Hitler in power. There was nothing inevitable about this development. The Third Reich did not have to come into existence."

"Prussia was not a country with an army, but an army with a country."

"Bismarck is the king's last mistress because only such a creature could have such power over an old man."

"A good many men will be killed, however, as long as no man can prove to me that a man can die more than once, I am not inclined to regard death for the individual as a misfortune."

"Either we are tremendously clever or the French strategists dreadful bunglers."

"A war is essentially the most dreadful and ruthless thing imaginable, therefore one's object should be so to conduct it as to bring it to an end at the earliest possible moment, and to this end one should give the enemy a distaste for it as quickly as one can; and it is more humane if I do this by burning down houses than by shooting down quite innocent soldiers."

"I know ... only one peril, that of Socialism, and I hope that all the Christian Churches would find a common aim in fighting against it."

"If at home there are people so innocent as to imagine that it is here a case of propaganda for Christian civilization and Christian ways, they would be disillusionized. Since the Thirty Years' War and the plundering campaigns of the French in the age of Louis XIV there has been nothing like it."

"I hear I am being attacked both in Prussian and American papers for being too hard on the Chinese and thus delaying the conclusion of peace. This is the outcome of ill-will and ignorance of the conditions ... One can advance things here only by taking as strong and as relentless measures as possible."

"Unfortunately I must state the fact that the rank and file will not return better men than they were when they started. They have seen too much of ruthlessness, brutality, robbery, executions etc., and have come into contact with altogether too many bad characters in the foreign contingents."

"I see a future for us only in a Great War in which we lastingly cripple an opponent, France or Russia. Unless there should be a great war, the only way out of our dilemma will be through internal commotion, preferably revolutions in France or Russia."

"We have far too many enemies, the French, the Slavs, above all the Catholics, and then the entire little rabble of the dispossessed, with their supporters"

"Everywhere the masses are on the move, everywhere there is rebellion against authority, the negation of all religion, the generation of hatred and envy against those with wealth. We are probably facing major catastrophes."

"The ghost of socialism is beginning to show a very earnest face ... the Zentrum is a gang of hypocritical blackguards without a Fatherland, intent on the collapse of Germany and the destruction of Prussia."

"Germany is the foundation for the mainstay for the whole of Europe, but if we become weak, the entire old world will fall apart."

""Democrat" is among officers simply a term denoting a bad lot."

"“How I despise the liberal gang that has captured the Chamber! They are prisoners of their own verbose unrealism, and are setting the country back further from year to year."

"Prince William is very keen on the idea of war and regrets that things seem now to look more pacific. He was pleased when I expressed to him my opinion that the enlargement of our army will soon set the stone rolling."

"People are telling me that I am regarded by the Chancellor (and indeed in wider circles) as the leader of the so-called War Party, and by no means favorably, as the Chancellor is most anxious to avoid war. I shall soon begin myself to believe that I am a thoroughly bad man! What will be brought up against me next?"

"We are living although the majority of the people do not realize it, in the midst of an immense revolution. What is radically wrong with our condition lies in the harsh contrast between rich and poor. This cannot go on forever, as we are human beings with human differences. No use is being made of religion, the only way towards alleviation and compensation; on the contrary, attempts are being deliberately made to excite the masses into asserting their equality with the middle and upper classes. The State contents itself with attempts to improve the material circumstances of the workers, with the only result that their covetousness has been intensified. The possibility of acquiring great sums of money by speculation has developed a fondness for luxury and enjoyment which has taken hold of wide circles. German family life is going to the dogs. Unfortunate marriages, divorces, youthful corruption, pleasure-seeking, the anxiety to seem richer than one is–all this is increasing terribly. In the lower classes of the great cities the demoralization has already reached a high degree ... The unequal distribution of wealth with all its consequences must lead in the end to a catastrophe."

"The Jewish question will always remain a difficult one. In this case also the State should not take up the role of prosecutor and should not tolerate attacks by Christians upon the Jews; but it should not give the Jews the kind of protection they demand in their newspapers. It would be the most effective way of combatting Jewish doctrine for Christians to worship the Golden Calf less and to become simpler in their habits and in their desires. We should not forget that many Christians are as bad as the Jews in their covetousness and that they despoil as pitilessly anyone who falls into their hands."

"In the cavalry sons of industrialists who have got rich quickly are pushing their way in and are ruining its simple customs."

"Prince Wilhelm seems to have a good deal of his grandfather about him. If his parents have aimed at training him to be a constitutional monarch ready to bow to the rule of a parliamentary majority they have failed."

"Prince Wilhelm justifies our very best hopes for the future. He will grow into the right man to maintaain Germany's power–perhaps to increase it."

"Prince Wilhelm has taken up an attitude strongly against England, a quite natural reaction for the most part against the efforts of his mother to make Anglomaniacs of her children."

"The Kaiser ... is not the right man to lead the Fatherland out of the many perils which threaten it."

"The Social Democrats ... perhaps their view of the Kaiser is the truest."

"[Liberals are] on the one hand, insolent beyond measure, but creeping along on their bellies in front of the Kaiser!"

"He wants to be his own Chief of Staff. God help our country!"

"The Kaiser can be very friendly in his manner but he is utterly lacking in genuine goodwill. For this reason he will win no lasting affection."

"[Adolphe Thiers's] wife and her sister [are] a couple of unattractive ladies, not at all pleasing representatives of the fair sex. I have on several occations seen Madame sleeping–in fact have heard her sleeping, for she snored loudly–at their soirées."

"I say we have the duty to take advantage of every favorable opportunity that presents itself and bring about a war with France. Militarily speaking, we are definitely at anadvantage thanks to the new repeating rifle, and in other ways too. But if we do not make use of such opportunities, then politics has to provide us with better ones, although I see no prospect of this."

"All the Progressive people with their supporters, the entire Judenschaft and most foreign countries, that is to say, taken together are formidable foes ... In view of the colossal influence which the Jews wiled by virtue of their wealth, through which they have secured the services of Christians in influential positions, even though they themselves are few in number, they are by far the most dangerous of our enemies."

"Too many people are under the influence of the Jews."

"[The Jews] are mostly fellows with no homeland, who have no interest in anything but making money, and who – wonder of wonders – mostly support the Progressives, and often even vote for Socialists at elections."

"Never before has a ruler been so beloved by his own people, so highly esteemed by the whole world."

"[Bismarck] asked me whether it would be desirable for us to march through Belgium, committing thereby a breach of neutrality. I explained that my advice must be against doing this whereas it seemed to me very much to be desired that France should operate through Belgium. The best thing for us, I maintained, would be that we should be at war with France and Russia simultaneously–the chances would be very good for us with Austria and Italy as our allies; whereas in a war with France alone Russia might be in a position to dictate to us the terms of peace. We were agreed that in the event of a war we must immediately take the offensive on the East, but not beyond Poland, and that we must then restore Poland."

"[Bismarck] cannot leave because he is afraid of his successor and of the anger which will be unleashed in many whom he has oppressed, lied to and deceived ... he has a very bad character; he has not hesitated to disclaim his friends and those who have helped him most; lying has become a habit with him; he has made use of his official position to enrich himself on a colossal scale and has had his sons promoted with unbelievable ruthlessness although no one thinks them competent!"

"I said to the Kaiser: "In spite of all this the Chancellor will not send in his resignation; he clings too firmly to office, hoping that if he can remain on he will again get the upper hand. In view of the whole intolerable situation, it would be best to force the Chancellor to resign–and as soon as possible–if he did not do so of his own accord.""

"What he is most lacking in are fixed aims and the faculty of persisting in the line he has taken up."

"How rare it is for a woman to support her husband aright in his position in the world, and for husband and wife to work together in complete harmony! During these last seven years Marie has won esteem and affection from high and low alike by her friendly bearing, her sincerity of character and her beneficence; spiritually she has exercised a stronger influence than have the clergy over many ladies and women."

"There can be no doubt as to the measureless shamelessness of the English in combating our really modest colonial efforts."

"If China revives again we could not wage war with her by ourselves."

"The amount of damage done to the country down to date by ravage and plunder will never be calculable, but it must be immense. It is only to be regretted that those who are most responsible for the war will be the ones least affected by it. Unfortunately, the looting has not failed to be attended by other excesses: outrages on women, barbarities of all descriptions, murder, wanton acts of incendiarism, etc."

"[The Americans] have been involved in looting affrays in the streets of Tien-tsin. When they are not with their regiments they must be regarded by the inhabitants as a scourge."

"We and the English are and must remain natural opponents. The world out to be big enough for both of us, but English covetousness oversteps all possible limits."

"Your Majesty may entertain the idea of partitioning China, but let it not be forgotten that ... it is still full of inexhaustible vitality. China has not completely lost its martial spirit, as may now be seen in the 'Boxer Movement'. Neither Japan nor any country in Europe or America is intellectually or militarily equipped to rule one quarter of mankind. Therefore it is actually an ill-advised policy to try dismemberment."

"It would doubtless be best for us to remain permanently on a good footing with England, even, if practicable, to be in alliance with her, but that is quite out of the question so long as this Power only wants to exploit us and in addition has the effrontery to make difficulties for us in our colonial policy everywhere. The astoundingly mean and shameless attacks made against the Kaiser by the English press will, one hopes, never be forgotten."

"It is really a good thing that the English should be unmasked at last and that the world should see what miserable hypocrites they are."

"England will soon show us her true face: It is a fight for existence between us. England wants to destroy Germany, her most serious rival in the world market, and, if not today or tomorrow, will do so soon, before the German fleet has been further strengthened. I do not believe that the matter will be taken so seriously in official circles with us. As in their way, the Liberal papers try to disguise the gravity of the situation; it is really too hard on them that their paragon, England, should want to break with free trade. A bitter revenge is now in store for those who have sought to turn Germany into an industrial country pure and simple."

"He is a very weak man, without firm opinions and most unclear in his goals. Unfortunately he is biased in extreme liberal ideas and does not want to accept that in these times a sovereign with such principles quickly digs his own grave. What an upheaval would arise in such a circumstance."

"He has an open head, a fresh mind, a great lust and energy to work, and a strongly developed Prussian feeling. Perhaps he is not excessively of much heart, but I believe that this is excellent for him and his future. In his outward behavior he is friendly and pleasant."

"To say I desire war is absurd. I only wish one thing: that our enemies renounce completely the idea of attacking us. I know too well what war is and am convinced that it is my duty as an honest man to wish that it be used only as a last resort, as much in the interests of my Fatherland as in the interests of the entire world."

"I think then it is my duty, if I believe it is possible to avoid [a war], to do everything in my power to arrive at this goal. If Providence, however, imposed on us a war, I will have every hope to succeed in the task which is entrusted in me. I am familiar with Germany’s spirit of sacrifice. I know with such confidence they will march behind their young emperor. I am familiar also with our army and I am certain of its superiority. The other nations can adopt our tactical formations and our weapons, but what they cannot imitate is the moral force which is the principal element of the strength of the German army."

"When the chancellor imagines I have the inclination to become his successor, he is mistaken tremendously. Right now, I wish that he continue holding his office and that he sees for himself how poorly he has operated recently. I consider anyone who wants to accept the succession to be very bold. When one or another successor has broken his neck, perhaps there is room for discussion."

"I am not a politician. Once and for all, I beg you not to believe the absurdities which malicious people seem to be publishing about me. I am contented with my military calling and have no higher ambition than to do credit to the post with which my sovereign has entrusted me."

"It is wonderful that certain people and circles still believe I have the aspiration to become Chancellor and receive nightmares from this thought. How often I have declared that I would have to be a fool if I wanted to strive for this really unenviable position! I have already achieved some time ago everything a soldier can achieve, I hold a post that involves little work and no agitation or anger, and I know the position of a Chancellor under Kaiser Wilhelm II only too well that I would have to be mad to desire it."

"[Wilhelm II] fishes for ovations and – as of course follows from that – is very open to flattery. All this has developed so quickly that I am constantly surprised by what he does. As Prince Wilhelm he seemed to have many of the excellent qualities of his grandfather, he was modest and simple in his way of life, avoided attracting attention, did not like being escorted by adjutants and was very considerate towards old people. Now he loves splendor to an alarming degree and is beginning to behave like Louis XIV."

"If he bears me a grudge because of his poor command of troops he shows that he lacks greatness of spirit and deserves to be treated as a little man. But if he has allowed himself to reflect calmly and to examine himself a little, he cannot but be grateful to me and tell himself that I acted without fear and did my duty. Then one could say: there is nobility in him after all."

"[Wilhelm I’s] venerable personality, known throughout the world for the conscientiousness and devotion to duty he showed until his dying day, with all his past, and the fact that he never gave any reason for malicious tongues to wag, was for us a bulwark against the tide of revolution. The present Kaiser, on the other hand, positively cultivates Social Democrats."

"The Emperor often lies to other people, but still more often to himself."

"It suited Fürst Bismarck well to make me appear a hypocrite, a supporter of Stoecker, a black reactionary, an instigator of war, etc., etc., so that the average philistine felt a shudder, whenever my name was mentioned. Herr von Caprivi was pleased to blow on the same horn, and under his regime my reputation has not improved."

"Should I rise to higher rank, this happiness can never compare to that which I enjoy in possessing you. Everything else is vastly secondary to this one great happiness. You are the greatest gift which God has bestowed on me."

"I pray to God that I may not have to live through what I see coming."

"Waldersee was a muddle-headed politician on whom no reliance was to be placed. He wanted war because he felt that he would be too old if peace lasted longer. His remark was of no importance. It was particularly stupid to believe that Waldersee could become Imperial Chancellor. Even as Chief of Staff he was unsatisfactory and Moltke had only preferred him to Caprivi and Häseler because he could do what he wanted with him. That was a bad turn which old Moltke had done the Army."

"Another danger [to the new Kaiser] was Waldersee and his following. Waldersee was the opponent of Bismarck and considered himself capable of and fitted for everything. Who will guarantee...that these gentlemen will not begin the old game again and tell the Emperor ‘You are really nothing but a puppet. Bismarck reigns’?...Bismarck, therefore, wishes Waldersee’s removal and will even send him if he can to Strasbourg as General in Command."

"The successor of Marshal von Moltke is a man of average size, a little older than 50. The hair is very thick, but with the whiteness of snow. His eyes are clear and placid, but his look is of an unusual fixedness. When the Count speaks, it is slow, and each word is pronounced clearly and vigorously. The attitude of the man, the manners, the voice and the gestures, or rather the complete absence of gestures, give an impression of cold determination that nothing would disturb."

"Waldersee’s anxiety to fight was so great that he was indifferent in his choice of enemies. He grasped at any opportunity to develop a small event into a casus belli. In rapid succession he advocated preventive wars, now against France, now against Russia, against them both."

"To read the original, unexpurgated diaries of this war-mongering, pietistic general is to cross the border into the realm of abnormal psychology. Waldersee seems to have suffered from some form of paranoid megalomania. He believed in a world conspiracy of the 'entirety' of international Jewry in league with all democratic forces at home and the majority of foreign Powers abroad to destroy the heroic aristocratic warrior monarchy of Prussia."

"As a military man he is an ace. A strong will, a clear eye, smartness, decisiveness, initiative. He is of the same stuff as were Frederick the Great’s soldiers, and Napoleon’s marshals. But I see two rocks ahead. He is excessively ambitious, both on the military and political sides, and inclined to intrigues. I believe that if ever he is Chancellor he will take a very drastic line against the two parties he hates so much, the Centre and the Social-Democrats."

"One should not comment on the actual motivating factor of the whole expedition, for if we were completely honest it is greed [Geldgier] which has encouraged us to cut into the big Chinese cake. We wanted to earn money, build railways, run mines, bring European culture, that means in one word, earn money. In this we are not an ounce better than the English in the Transvaal."

"The moment Russia mobilizes, Germany also will mobilize, and will unquestionably mobilize her whole army."

"If we again slink out of this affair with our tail between our legs, if we cannot pull ourselves together to present demands which we are prepared to enforce by the sword, then I despair of the future of the German Reich."

"If there is no change in the political situation in Europe, Germany's central position will compel her to form a front on several sides. We shall therefore have to hold one front defensively with comparatively weak forces in order to be able to take the offensive on the other. That front can only be the French. A speedy decision may be hoped for on that side, while an offensive against Russia would be an interminable affair. But if we are to take the offensive against France, it would be necessary to violate the neutrality of Belgium. It is only by an advance across Belgium that we can hope to attack and defeat the French army in the open field."

"[The next war will be between France and Germany and it will be] a question of life or death for us. We shall stop at nothing to gain our end. In the struggle for existence, one does not bother about the means one employs."

"We are ready [for war], and the sooner it comes, the better for us."

"Revolution in India and Egypt, and also in the Caucuses...is of the highest importance. The treaty with Turkey will make it possible for the Foreign Office to realise this idea and to awaken the fanaticism of Islam."

"It is dreadful to be condemned to inactivity in this war which I prepared and initiated."

"The Germans were not, as the phrase 'more or less' makes clear, optimistic. Moltke himself had warned the Kaiser as early as 1906 that the next war would be 'a long wearisome struggle' which would 'utterly exhaust our own people, even if we are victorious'. 'We must prepare ourselves', he wrote in 1912, 'for a long campaign, with numerous tough, protracted battles.' He was just as gloomy when he discussed the issue with his Austrian counterpart, Franz Conrad von Hôtzendorff, in May 1914: T will do what I can. We are not superior to the French.' In any case, 'The sooner the better' was not the watchword of Moltke alone. His Russian counterpart, Yanushkevich, threatened to 'smash his telephone' after the Tsar had finally approved general mobilization, to avoid the risk of being told of a royal change of heart."

"The puzzle is why [France's] heavy losses did not lead to a complete collapse - as had happened in 1870 and would happen again in 1940. Some credit must certainly go to the imperturbable French Commander-in-Chief Joseph Joffre, and particularly to his ruthless purge of senescent or incompetent French commanders as the crisis unfolded. Fundamentally, however, time was against Moltke for the simple reason that the French could redeploy more swiftly than the Germans could advance once they had left their troop trains. On August 23 the three German armies on Moltke's right wing constituted twenty-four divisions, facing just seventeen and a half Entente divisions; by September 6 they were up against forty-one. The chance of a decisive victory was gone, if it had ever existed. At the Marne, the failure of Moltke's gamble was laid bare. He himself suffered a nervous breakdown."

"War is the life-element of an army."

"Of great bodily and mental mobility—which, however, is often enough increased to a continuous restlessness—the French soldier is indefatigable and persevering in battle, as well as in hard work of all kinds."

"All these good military qualities which urge on the French soldier to advance impetuously, show their brilliant effects only so long as you allow him to advance. The sentiment individuel, which is at the root of all his qualifications for attack, has its great disadvantages too. The soldier, being principally busied with himself, goes along with the mass as long as it advances successfully; but if this mass be forcibly, and, perhaps, unexpectedly, made to retire, its cohesion, the connection of every individual with his comrade, is soon severed, and the more so as, in such a case, the careless tactical training of the troops renders all steadiness impossible, and leads to confusion and utter dissolution."

"The French soldier follows his officers eagerly and willingly into battle, but only so long as these officers are in front of him, and literally lead him on."

"On the whole, the French officer is intelligent and eager for war; he knows what he is about, and—especially under fire—he knows how to act on his own responsibility, and how to excite the men by the example of his own bravery. Add to this—for the majority of them—a good deal of campaigning and fighting experience, and we must say that they are possessed of qualities which place them very high in their profession."

"French generals must be regarded as comparatively young and bodily active, intelligent, energetic, experienced in war and well adapted for it, though but a few have, so far, shown themselves unusually clever and well acquainted with the handling of large bodies of troops, and though neither the Crimean nor the Italian war have developed any extraordinary military genius."

"He is a man of very high standing in the Prussian army, where he has particularly distinguished himself by revolutionising the old pedantic system of teaching the soldier skirmishing, patrolling, outpost, and light infantry duty generally. His new method is now introduced in that army. It is remarkable for doing away with all pedantry of forms, and exclusively appealing to the intellectual resources of the soldier in the performance of a duty which can only be carried out well by the intelligent and harmonious co-operation of a number of men."

"Charging that Germany had been attacked, Chancellor Hitler at 5:11 o'clock this morning issued a proclamation to the army declaring that from now on force will be met with force and calling on the armed forces 'to fulfill their duty to the end.'"

"Under the headline, "Hitler Gives Word," Otto Tolischus presented only the view of Hitler and the Nazis concerning the events along the German-Polish border. In the very next paragraph, Tolischus reprinted Hitler's proclamation, which the dictator calculated as a way to fire up the German public for war."

"When we have assured ourselves that the Bible is really as old and as truthful a record of history as it pretends to be^ and that it has for it such human testimony as leads us to admit historic facts in general, we shall occupy ourselves with its contents, with the influence which this wonderful book, this ancient testament of our royal Sire, exercises upon the heart, the mind, the general culture, by which it leads us to our inheritance, and enables us to assume our place in our destined home."