authors-from-germany

"From the outset, Bergoglio wanted to break with papal continuity, challenge what had been handed down, confuse it or simply cause "chaos", as Javier Martinez-Brocal says in his new book."

"We have such difficulty understanding this renunciation today because the relationship to marriage and children has clearly shifted. To have to die without children was once synonymous with a useless life: The echoes of my own life die away, and I am completely dead. If I have children, then I continue to live in them; it's a sort of immortality through posterity. ..."

"He is the most widely read theologian of the contemporary age, with over 13 million copies of his books on Jesus in circulation. Symposiums on him are held all over the world."

"The renunciation of marriage and family is thus to be understood in terms of this vision: I renounce what, humanly speaking, is not only the most normal but also the most important thing. I forgo bringing forth further life on the tree of life, and I live in the faith that my land is really God - and so I make it easier for others, also, to believe that there is a kingdom of heaven. I bear witness to Jesus Christ, to the Gospel, not only with words, but also with this specific mode of existence, and I place my life in this form at his disposal."

"Non ci sono due Ratzinger, ce n'è uno solo che pratica la teologia non contro ma con la Chiesa. Per scrivere la sua biografia ho intervistato più di cento persone che lo conoscono, sono andate a scuola con lui, hanno studiato sotto di lui o per lui. E come giornalista che lo ha accompagnato per quasi 30 anni, sono convinto che questa definizione sia sbagliata."

"Islam has a total organization of life that is completely different from ours; it embraces simply everything. There is a very marked subordination of woman to man; there is a very tightly knit criminal law, indeed, a law regulating all areas of life, that is opposed to our modern ideas about society. One has to have a clear understanding that it is not simply a denomination that can be included in the free realm of a pluralistic society."

"Celibacy is not a matter of compulsion. Someone is accepted as a priest only when he does it of his own accord."

"He had been in a wheelchair for some time, and his voice was barely audible. But his spirit was still alert. He conveyed great sadness about what is happening in Europe, the war and the situation of the Church. I asked him, Pope Benedict, why he had not yet met death. He replied that he felt he had to stay, as a witness to what he represented, a sign of his direction, of Christ's message, of the desire to strengthen the conscience of the faith and, above all, not to think about adulterations and structural changes."

"Women are most adorable when they are afraid; that's why they frighten so easily."

"The revolutionary concludes overhastily that the world will now for all time be guided by the political principles which governed him in overthrowing it. The reactionary takes the diametrically opposite line: he seriously considers it possible to delete the Revolution from the page of history as if it had never been. The revolutionary is soon cured of his error. The very day that sees the old moulds of life shattered, brings home to him the urgent necessity of casting it into new moulds. [...] The reactionary on the other hand imagines that we need only revert to the old moulds in order to have everything again exactly "as it was before." He has no inclination to compromise with the new."

"The liberal has flourished at all periods. The nobody is always eager to imagine himself a somebody. The man who is a misfit in his own society is always a liberal out of amour propre. The disinterestedness of the conservative cherishes the sacredness of a cause that shall not die with him; the liberal says: Après moi, le déluge. Conservatism is rooted in the strength of man; liberalism battens on his weakness. The liberal's conjuring trick consists in turning others' weakness to his own account, living at other men's expense, and concealing his art with patter about ideals. This is the accusation against him. He has always been a source of gravest danger."

"Amongst the discoveries which reason made, the most fateful was this: that man is not free. It might well have seemed the most obviously reasonable thing to hedge this unfree man about with state conventions. Instead, the liberals demanded that this man-who was biologically unfree-should have perfect individual and political freedom."

"The liberal professes to do all he does for the sake of the people; but he dl'stroys the sense of community that should bind outstanding men to the people from which they spring. The prnple should J1aturally regard the outstanding man, not as an enemy bul as a representative sample of themselves. Liberalism is the party of upstarts who have insinuated Liberalism is the party of upstarts who have insinuated themselves IJclwecn the people and its big men. Liberals feel themselves as isolated individuals, responsible to nobody. They do not share the nation's traditions, they are indifferent to its pasl and have no ambition for its future. They seek only their own personal advantage in the present. Their dream is the great International, in which the differences of peoples and languages, races and cultures will be obliterated. To promote this they are willing to make use, now of nationalism, now of pacificism, now of militarism, according to the expediency of the moment. Sceptically they ask: "What are we living for?" Cynically they answer: Just for the sake of living!"

"A Policy may be reversed: History cannot."

"Every people has its own socialism."

"Liberalism has taught the West to turn its principles into tactics to deceive the people. The west dubs this 'democracy,' though it has become evident enough how ill men thrive on a political diet of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity."

"The materialist outlook is anthropomorphic. It does not lift man metaphysically above and beyond himself, but rationalistically drags him down to what it conceives to be his real self. It was the rationalist age of enlightenment that saw the birth of this philosophy. Up to that time man's thought had always been cosmic; it had found its justification in the divine justice and the divine holiness. It was conscious of a spiritual immanence. The rationalist's pride was to see only the animal in man. The humanist had stressed the mystic tie that binds the creature to the Creator. The rationalist created l'homme machine, a living automaton, a miracle of mud. Creation was explained not through the Creator but through the creature, and the creature was reduced to the sum of the matter of which he was composed and on which he was nourished. Rousseau's vegetative ideal, which aimed at being philanthropic, only added a sentimental touch. The French Revolution put these theories politically to the test and demanded " rights" for the enlightened man, expressly based on his "physical needs."German thought rebelled against this degradation of man. German minds took heed of the spiritual as well as the bodily needs of man and evolved the conception of the "Education of the Human Race," by which all that had been lost might be re-won. Their interpretation of universal history had nothing to do with a mechanical "Progress," but passionately sought to recapture for man the ideals he had abandoned. Our escape from rationalism to idealism was signalized by the attention's being directed not to human rights but to human dignity."

"There have been peoples who flourished under democracy; there have been peoples who perished under democracy. Democracy may imply stoicism, republicanism and inexorable severity; or it may imply liberalism, parliamentary chatter and self-indulgence."

"Revolutions are only interludes in history. Marx called them the steam engines of history. We might rather call them the collisions of history: immense railway accidents which take their toll of sacrifice; which may be pregnant of consequences, but which have something of the banality of accidental catastrophes. [...] At best catastrophes have the virtue of calling attention with a terrible emphasis to existing faults, to which custom and stupidity and self-sufficiency have blinded us. The necessary salvage work after a revolution must, however, be handed over to some experienced person conversant with the whole administration who can set the wrecked, overturned engine in motion again. Life of its own weight resumes its equilibrium, and the conservative principle on which all life is based is vindicated."

"The reactionary's reading of history is as superficial as the conservative's is profound. The reactionary sees the world as he has known it; the conservative sees it as it has been and will always be. He distinguishes the transitory from the eternal. Exactly what has been, can never be again. But what the world has once brought forth she can bring forth again."

"Marxism has in fact all the symptoms of a materialistic utopia. Marx credited the proletariat with the power to create a perpetuum mobile. Provided it was logically conceived 11 ought to be feasible. But the world itself is the perpetuum mobile. And Demiurgos allows no meddling with his job."

"The Revolution can never be un-made. A revolution may be combated while there is yet time while there is yet faith that help may be found for the nation in its need. Such help will most readily be found in the government which has hitherto been the nation's best protector. But once a revolution has become a fact, there is nothing left for the thinking man but to accept it as a new datum, a new starting-point."

"The English always talked of freedom. They always sought their own freedom at the expense of everyone else's. They early developed a peculiar mode of thought based on a confusion of ideas, which gave precedence not to a cause for its own sake but to the advantage they themselves derived from it. There was no hypocrisy in this: though it looked like hypocrisy. It was merely an incredible naivete combined with a natural brutality of approach. The English were perfectly unconscious of these things. Their trump card was their stupidity, and in their stupidity lay their highest shrewdness."

"Liberalism was the ruin of Greece. The decay of hellenic freedom was preceded by the rise of the liberal. He was begotten of Greek 'enlightenment.' From the philosophers' theory of the atom, the sophist drew the inference of the individual. Protagoras, the Sophist, was the founder of individualism and also the apostle of relativity. He proclaimed that: "Opposite propositions are equally true." Nothing immoral was intended. He meant that there are no general but only particular truths: according to the standpoint of the perceiver. But what happens when the same man has two standpoints? When he is ready to shift his standpoint as his advantage may dictate? This same Protagoras proclaimed that rhetoric could make the weaker cause victorious. Still nothing immoral was intended. He meant that the better cause was sometimes the weaker and should then be helped to victory. But the practice soon arose of using rhetoric to make the worse cause victorious. It is no accident that the sophists were the first Greek philosophers to accept pay, and were the most highly paid. A materialist outlook leads always to a materialist mode of thought."

"Our enemies have their present success. The moment is in their favour, but everything else is against them. The secret, however, must not be revealed before its time. What we can, however, already detect is a regrouping of men and nations. All anti-liberal forces are combining against everything that is liberal. We are living in the time of this transition. The change is taking place most logically from below and attacking the enemy where his power began. There is a revolt against the age of reason."

"The principle of liberalism is to have no fixed principle and to contend that this is in itself a principle."

"The population problem is THE problem of Germany: a socialist problem if you will, but more exactly a German problem. Since access to the outer world is forbidden us we must look for its solution within our own borders; and since it cannot there be solved, a day must come when we shall burst our frontiers and seek and find it outside. [...]The victors have no population problems. Their countries give a home to all who speak their tongue. In addition they possess other lands to which their people may migrate. They have divided up the globe between them. Since the word 'annexation' has acquired an ugly ring, and 'sphere of influence' is no less suspect, they have invented the idea of the mandate and conferred it on themselves through the League of Nations. They have now not enough people to take possession of these countries and administer them to full advantage, or to bring them up to that level of progress which they consider it their peculiar privilege to promote. The population problem of the victors is that of declining populations."

"The liberal is inspired by the ambition of the would-be great man who does not want to take the lower seat, the anxiety of the inadequate person to miss nothing. Jealousy of power explains this hate of genius, of anyone who is great, who does, singlehanded, things which can never be done by the many. Jealousy of power explains this hate of the dynasties with their hereditary prestige and privilege; this hate of the Papacy with its traditional authority transmitted to the wearer of the tiara; the hostility to Louis XIV's and to Pius IX's doctrines of infallibility. This jealousy of power explains no less that passion for constitutions which make power dependent on elections; this craze for parliaments to take control of the state; this mania for republics in which the parties divide the power and party leaders draw the pay and the electors enjoy the party patronage; or the preference for a limited monarchy that has resigned all real power but still lays claim to grace."

"Who is the liberal chameleon: democracy? Who is this Moloch who devours the masses and the classes and the trades and the professions and all human distinctions? Who is this Leviathan? We must not let either the rhetoric or the bonhomie of the democrat deceive us about the true nature of the monster."

"All this was hailed as progress: but it spelt decay. The same process continues: the disciples of reason, the apostles of enlightenment, the heralds of progress are usually in the first generation great idealists, high-principled men, convinced of the importance of their discoveries and of the benefit these confer on man. But no later than the second generation the peculiar and unholy connection betrays itself which exists between materialist philosophy and nihilist interpretation. As at the touch of a conjuror's wand the scientific theory of the atom reduces society to atoms."

"Schiller long ago formulated the idealist conception of history, which secs in man a free moral agent, controlling nature. The materialists never got beyond the positivist point of view which confines history to an attempt to understand conditions, describe their phenomena and analyse their components. There is, however, another point of view possible: a metaphysical, which includes the physical, an intellectual, which includes the scientific: a point of view which recognizes the sublimity and rises above the degradation of man: the only point of view from which an answer is possible to the question: Who created the circumstances? It is no answer to reply that the circumstances created themselves. Marx never allowed himself to speculate whether perhaps materialism might not be merely a transition to some greater principle behind. He clung to the assertion that men make their own history, not as free agents, but under the compulsion of given circumstances. Again we ask: but who created the circumstances? There can only be one answer: Man himself is the datum."

"The morning's dollar level became the substitute for morning prayer. We are still thinking of nothing but the miseries of to-day: the capitalist and proletarian think of nothing else. We have sunk to a depth which man never reached before: the materialist conception of history has reached its zenithCan this last for ever? We know that it cannot. Disgust at materialism, at ourselves, has seized us. Reaction has set in, a reaction against socialism itself. Socialism can only help if it can purge itself of its materialism, its rationalism andwhat has been the most fatal thing of all-its liberalism."

"The German nation is astir. Its path is blocked. It has lost its bearings. It seeks space. It seeks work: and fails to find it. We are becoming a nation of proletarians."

"Late in the afternoon of the same day [14th February, 1843] I rode through the city, to the ruins of the palace of the Sultan Feroze, situated a few hundred steps without the south gate. On the plateau of this palace is the celebrated Feroze-Cotelah, or column. It is one of those columns which the pious Fabian speaks of, in his travells 1400 years ago, and of which there is still one in the fort of Allahabad, and three others in North Behar, one in Terai, near to the frontiers of Nepaul, the second not far from Bettiah, and the third on the river Gandaki. They have all the same inscriptions, in the ancient Pali, or Deva Magadhi language, and the Feroze-Cotelah has, also, inscriptions in Persian and Sanscrit. The learned James Princep succeeded in deciphering that in the Pali language. It is an edict of As-o-ko [Ashoka], the Bhoodist king of all India, who lived from 325 to 288 B.C., forbidding the destruction of living animals, and enforcing the observance of Bhoodism [Buddhism]. The Feroze-Cotelah consists of one piece of brown granite; it is ten feet in circumference, and, gradually tapering towards the summit, rises to the height of 42 feet. It is embedded in the platform of the completely ruined palace. The sun was nearly setting when I arrived before these extensive ruins: I tied my horse to a portion of the standing wall, and clambered over ponderous arches and porticoes up to the plateau. On this spot, standing before a monument more than two thousand years old, which reminded me of three great epochs of the history of India, that of the Bhoodists, of the Brahmins, and of the Moguls, surrounded by ruins, extending further than the eye could reach, with a view of Delhi, whose minarets and domes were gilded by the setting sun, – those times and nations could not fail to rise in a magic picture before my mind."

"Lord Ellenborough, the Governor General, made his entry into Ferozpur on the 9th of December, with 120 elephants, 700 camels, and numerous wagons…General Nott crossed the Sutlej with his corps on the 23rd of December, the anniversary of the murder of Sir William M‘Naughten. He brought with him the famous sandal-wood gates of Somnauth, which were covered with red cloth, embroidered with gold, and drawn by twenty-four oxen. It is said that Mahmood the Ghuznevide took these gates with him to Ghuznee, when he destroyed the temple of Somnauth, in 1025; but this splendid Hindoo temple, to which they are to be restored, retains scarcely a trace of its former magnificence, and its remains have been converted into a mosque. The Maharaja, Shere Singh, had not only sent a bodyguard to receive the gates on British territory, but had given a present of a sum of money to the escort. When I went to examine the gates more closely the next day, I found a number of Brahmins, strewing flowers upon them, who assured me there was not the slightest doubt that they were genuine. They are most skillfully carved with stars and arabesques, and bordered with Kufic characters, but unfortunately the gates are so much injured, that scarcely the half of the beautiful work has been preserved."

"Very early in the morning of my last day’s sojourn here, I rode with General Simpson to the village of Sarnath. It is six miles north-east of Benares, and three, of the cantonments, and evidently lies on a classic soil, for, that a large and mighty city must have stood here, is amply testified by the numerous ruins, and beautifully-formed bricks, with which all the ground, and especially the banks of a lake, which extends from east to west, are covered. The only fragment which has been preserved, is a vaulted tower about sixty feet high; it is built of granite and blocks of red sandstone, which are let into one another, and fastened without any cement, and in the upper portion some bricks have been introduced. The diameter of its base is about 100 feet, and the whole of the exterior, forms a round domed cone, similar to the Manikeeala in the Punjab. This remarkable tower is a compact mass of stone, without any open space in the interior, and merely covers a deep well, into which the corpse of a king was probably let down. A copper tablet found upon its highest summit bears an inscription, which, as far as I know, has not yet been deciphered: it is now in the museum of the Asiatic Society at Calcutta. At an elevation of about twenty feet from the ground are several niches, surrounded by elegant arabesques, in which statutes of men, women, and children, the size of life, formerly stood: some of these have been removed to Calcutta, to save them from the destructive spirit of the natives; seven statutes of red sandstone, which were sadly mutilated were, however, lying about. They are the figures of a people, with flat noses, thick lips, and unusually large eyes. The hair lies perfectly smooth to the head, and falls in innumerable curls over the neck and shoulders. Some of them were quite naked, others wrapped in light garments, which are very curiously wrought, and fit tight to the body, or fall in picturesque folds. One of these figures wore a cord round the waist, exactly similar to that which distinguishes the Brahmins."

"One of the greatest curiosities of Delhi is the Coottub-Minar, which is fifteen miles from the city, and is a conspicuous object at a great distance. This celebrated pillar was erected in 1193 by Coottubud-Deen, the founder of the Ghoorides, who overthrew the throne of the Brahmins in Delhi, in commemoration of the triumph of Mahometanism over Brahminism… About eight O’clock I stood before the lofty Coottub Minar: it is built of very fine, hard red sandstone, is 62 feet in diameter at the base, and rises to the height of 265 feet; it is divided into three stories, and the upper gallery is elevated 242 feet 6 inches above the ground. This column, which is the highest in the world, was intended by Coottub-ud-Deen to mark the entrance to a mosque which he purposed building. The lower story is about 90 feet high, and is built in alternate angular and concave channelings, on which sentences from the Koran are inscribed in raised Arabic characters; the other two stories consist of concave flutings only, and diminish gradually to the summit. The whole is crowned by a small dome, which is supported by eight square pillars: this dome was shattered by an earthquake in the year 1803, but has been restored by the English in its original form. The column stands in the midst of some very ancient Bhoodist and Hindoo buildings and Mahometan ruins. The colossal gates and columns, and the bold vaults of the former, still indicate an age of great prosperity, which intended to immortalize its faith and its history by the grandest works of art. On the cornices are sculptures, representing the processions of their kings, similar to those of the princes of our times. The pilasters are ornamented with elephants’ heads; and a careful observer might here trace some isolated moments of the history of an age long since past, and of which so little is known. A longer stay than I was enabled to make is however indispensable to an investigation of this kind, and I was forced to content myself with a cursory view. In one of the courts is an ancient iron pillar thirty feet high, with Sanscrit and Arabic inscriptions, on which the tyrant Nadir Shah, in a passion, struck a violent blow with a hatchet, the mark of which still remains."

"Every culture is unique, none is universal."

"The cognitive preeminence of East-Asians in several intellectual and artistic disciplines is fascinating and terrifying to look at."

"Not a single Buddha, bodhisattva, or shengren in Europe, but in Asia: all philosophers and saints? What is that probability?"

"The cultural and economic penalty for not recognizing East-Asian talent is immense."

"Hey, China, You look like one of us. Look what we've made you!"

"Calling Confucius a philosopher is the wrong classification. Like calling a whale a fish."

"The shengren is above philosophy and beyond religion. He is decisively not European. This will be read in a thousand years."

"There is nothing paradox about Confucius. He is a shengren."

"The smallest leaves and twigs will bend and break... If our criteria was 'longevity', however, we would be safest to bet on the two great branches of World History, the East and the West."

"Any sage can do philosophy, but not every philosopher is a sage."

"Of all the cultures that have disappeared from the world, not a single farewell letter or suicide note has been unearthed."

"The shengren is the single most important concept in Chinese history."

"Communism and capitalism were made for scale and the masses, and scale and the masses are now in Asia."