Nobel Laureates In Literature

"To become conscious means to acquire conscience, means the knowledge of what is good and what is evil. Nature that is infra-human does not know this difference. It is without guilt. In humanity nature becomes responsible. Man is nature’s fall from grace, only it is not a fall, but just as positively an elevation as conscience is higher than innocence. What Christianity calls “ original sin ” is more than priestly trickery designed to suppress and control humanity — it is the deep feeling of man as a spiritual being for his natural infirmities and limitations, above which he raises himself through spirit. Is that infidelity to nature? By no means. It is according to nature’s deepest intent. Because it is for its own spiritualization that nature produced mankind."

"The anti-human, dictatorial mentality of our day ignores “ original sin,” or what may be called spiritual conscience. It considers the consciousness of sin, or spirituality, as injurious to military prowess. It teaches optimistic heroics — in direct and stupid contradiction of the extreme contempt for humanity, which it exalts in the same breath."

"For all men of violence, tyrants, those who seek to stupefy and stultify the masses, and all those who are intent upon turning a nation into an unthinking war-machine in order to control free and thinking citizens — these necessarily despise humanity."

"Plato’s insistence that philosophers should rule the state would create a dangerous Utopia if it merely implied that the ruler should be a philosopher. The philosopher must also be a ruler — for that, primarily, creates the relationship of mind and life which we call democratic."

"I have perhaps an insufficient awareness of the menace emanating from Russia toward the capitalistic social order; for I am no capitalist. But at least I can see that Russia does not imperil the essential upon which all else depends — namely, peace. It is not Russia that forces Europe, twenty years after the World War, to withdraw enormous resources from peaceful purposes and apply them to armaments; it is fascism and its so-called dynamics. If the world cannot achieve peace and progress, it is the fault of fascism and not of socialism."

"Such a meeting of German demands will again be in order after Hitler’s fall. But for the present any yielding to Nazi threats means a cruel and discouraging blow to those forces among the German people that are sincerely working toward freedom and peace; and since German demands that issue from National-Socialism are never aimed at peace, but exclusively at an increase of power and the improvement of its military position, their fulfilment does not serve peace but war."

"It is probable that fascism will continue to prefer this kind of war to actual open warfare as long as possible, for a real war would soon reveal the important role which lies and deception play in the “totalitarian state.”"

"Hold fast the time! Guard it, watch over it, every hour, every minute! Unregarded it slips away, like a lizard, smooth, slippery, faithless, a pixy wife. Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each its true and due fulfillment."

"Cruelty is one of the chief ingredients of love, and divided about equally between the sexes: cruelty of lust, ingratitude, callousness, maltreatment, domination. The same is true of the passive qualities, patience under suffering, even pleasure in ill usage."

"Profundity must smile."

"This music of yours. A manifestation of the highest energy — not at all abstract, but without an object, energy in a void, in pure ether — where else in the universe does such a thing appear? We Germans have taken over from philosophy the expression ‘in itself,’ we use it every day without much idea of the metaphysical. But here you have it, such music is energy itself, yet not as idea, rather in its actuality. I call your attention to the fact that is almost the definition of God. Imitatio Dei — I am surprised it is not forbidden."

"Why does almost everything seem to me like its own parody? Why must I think that almost all, no, all the methods and conventions of art today are good for parody only?"

"What a glorious gift is imagination, and what satisfaction it affords!"

"Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated."

"The intellect longs for the delights of the non-intellect, that which is alive and beautiful dans sa stupidité."

"What a wonderful phenomenon it is, carefully considered, when the human eye, that jewel of organic structures, concentrates its moist brilliance on another human creature!"

"O scenes of the beautiful world! Never have you presented yourself to more appreciative eyes."

"Mann has the high and now seldom encountered liberal virtue of elevating any discussion to another plane — of writing as if men were reasoning creatures, even if the evidence points to the contrary. Calmly and logically he showed that the novel is today "the representative and dominating literary work of art" — that the Jewish influence is not preponderant among the exiled novelists — that the international or European spirit, shared equally by Jewish and gentile writers, has helped to raise Germany from barbarism. And he added that the anti-Semitic campaign of the present German rulers "is aimed, essentially, not at the Jews at all, or not at them exclusively. It is aimed at Europe and at the real spirit of Germany.""

"I can never get over the fact that Thomas Mann would read the day’s pages, gather the family round at night and read to them what he had written during the day."

"You listen and live prudently, in fact you do not live at all, but work and save and are burdened with cares; and so your whole life passes. Then, all of a sudden, the whole thing turns upside down; times come when the world mocks at reason, when the Church shuts its doors and is silent, when authority becomes mere brute force, when they who have made their money honestly and with the sweat of their brows lose both their time and their money, and the violent win the game. No one recognizes your efforts and there is no one to help or advise you how to keep what you have earned and saved. Can this be? Surely this cannot be?"

"The people were divided into the persecuted and those who persecuted them. That wild beast, which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been removed, was now set free. The signal was given, the barriers were down. As has so often happened in the history of man, permission was tacitly granted for acts of violence and plunder, even for murder, if they were carried out in the name of higher interests, according to established rules, and against a limited number of men of a particular type and belief. A man who saw clearly and with open eyes and was then living could see how this miracle took place and how the whole of a society could, in a single day, be transformed. In a few minutes the business quarter, based on centuries of tradition, was wiped out. It is true that there had always been concealed enmities and jealousies and religious intolerance, coarseness and cruelty, but there had also been courage and fellowship and a feeling for measure and order, which restrained all these instincts within the limits of the supportable and, in the end, calmed them down and submitted them to the general interest of life in common. Men who had been leaders in the commercial quarter for forty years vanished overnight as if they had all died suddenly, together with the habits, customs and institutions which they represented."

"For a man filled with a great, true and unselfish love, even if it be on one side only, there open horizons and possibilities and paths which are closed and unknown to so many clever, ambitious and selfish men."

"Lost in his thoughts he looked out from his shop at the shining loveliness of that first day of March. Opposite him, a little to the side, stood the eternal bridge, everlastingly the same; through its white arches could be seen the green, sparkling, tumultous waters of the Drina, so that they seemed like some strange diadem in two colours which sparkled in the sun."

"Whenever a government feels the need of promising peace and prosperity to its citizens by means of a proclamation, it is time to be on guard and expect the opposite."

"The common people remember and tell of what they are able to grasp and what they are able to transform into legend. Anything else passes them by without deeper trace, with the dumb indifference of nameless natural phenomena, which do not touch the imagination or remain in the memory. This hard and long building process was for them a foreign task undertaken at another's expense. Only when, as the fruit of this effort, the great bridge arose, men began to remember details and to embroider the creation of a real, skilfully built and lasting bridge with fabulous tales which they well knew how to weave and to remember."

"There are no buildings that have been built by chance, remote from the human society where they have grown and its needs, hopes and understandings, even as there are no arbitrary lines and motiveless forms in the work of the masons. The life and existence of every great, beautiful and useful building, as well as its relation to the place where it has been built, often bears within itself complex and mysterious drama and history."

"The town and its outskirts were only the settlements which always and inevitably grow up around an important centre of communications and on either side of great and important bridges. Here also in time the houses crowded together and the settlements multiplied at both ends of the bridge. The town owed its existence to the bridge and grew out of it as if from an imperishable root."

"For the greater part of its course the river Drina flows through narrow gorges between steep mountains or through deep ravines with precipitous banks. In a few places only the river banks spread out to form valleys with level or rolling stretches of fertile land suitable for cultivation and settlement on both sides."

"From everything that man erects and builds in his urge for living nothing is in my eyes better and more valuable than bridges. They are more important than houses, more sacred than shrines. Belonging to everyone and being equal to everyone, useful, always built with a sense, on the spot where most human needs are crossing, they are more durable than other buildings and they do not serve for anything secret or bad."

"Perhaps this impure infidel faith that puts everything in order, cleans everything up, repairs and embellishes everything only in order suddenly and violently to demolish and destroy, might spread through the whole world; it might make of all God's world an empty field for its senseless building and criminal destruction, a pasturage for its insatiable hunger and incomprehensible demands? Anything might happen. But one thing could not happen; it could not be that great and wise men of exalted soul who would raise lasting buildings for the love of God, so that the world should be more beautiful and man live in it better and more easily, should everywhere and for all time vanish from this earth. Should they too vanish, it would mean that the love of God was extinguished and had disappeared from the world. That could not be."

"If they destroy here, then somewhere else someone else is building. Surely there are still peaceful countries and men of good sense who know of God's love? If God had abandoned this unlucky town on the Drina, he had surely not abandoned the whole world that was beneath the skies? They would not do this for ever. But who knows?"

"The bridge remained as if under sentence of death, but none the less still whole and untouched, between the two warring sides."

"The great aristocrat, the beloved leader, the profound historian, the gifted painter, the superb politician, the lord of language, the orator, the wit—yes, and the dedicated bricklayer—behind all of them was a simple man of faith, steadfast in defeat, generous in victory, resigned in age, trusting in a loving providence, and committing his achievements and his triumphs to a higher power."

"Marshal Stalin proposed a toast to the health of the Prime Minister, whom he characterized as the bravest governmental figure in the world. He said that due in large measure to Mr. Churchill's courage and staunchness, England, when she stood alone, had divided the might of Hitlerite Germany at a time when the rest of Europe was falling flat on its face before Hitler. He said that Great Britain, under Mr. Churchill's leadership, had carried on the fight alone irrespective of existing or potential allies. The Marshal concluded that he knew of few examples in history where the courage of one man had been so important to the future history of the world. He drank a toast to Mr. Churchill, his fighting friend and a brave man."

"In contrast to the ultimate realization that he was dealing with a formidable enemy in the east, Hitler clung to the end to his preconceived opinion that the troops of the Western countries were poor fighting material... His opinions on the Western statesmen had a similar bias. He considered Churchill, as he often stated during the situation conferences, an incompetent, alcoholic demagogue. And he asserted in all seriousness that Roosevelt was not a victim of infantile paralysis but of syphilitic paralysis and was therefore mentally unsound. These opinions, too, were indications, of his flight from reality in the last years of his life."

"In their native countries, Roosevelt and Churchill are regarded as examples of wise statesmen. But we, during our jail conversations, were astonished by their constant shortsightedness and even stupidity. How could they, retreating gradually from 1941 to 1945, leave Eastern Europe without any guarantees of independence? How could they abandon the large territories of Saxony and Thuringia in return for such a ridiculous toy as the four-zoned Berlin that, moreover, was later to become their Achilles' heel? And what kind of military or political purpose did they see in giving away hundreds of thousands of armed Soviet citizens (who were unwilling to surrender, whatever the terms) for Stalin to have them killed? It is said that by doing this, that they secured the imminent participation of Stalin in the war against Japan. Already armed with the Atomic bomb, they did pay for Stalin so that he wouldn’t refuse to occupy Manchuria to help Mao Zedong to gain power in China and Kim Il Sung, to get half of Korea!… Oh, misery of political calculation! When later Mikolajczyk was expelled, when the end of Beneš and Masaryk came, Berlin was blocked, Budapest was in flames and turned silent, when ruins fumed in Korea and when the conservatives fled from Suez – didn’t really some of those who had a better memory, recall for instance the episode of giving away the Cossacks?"

"Sir Winston Churchill is the leader of the Conservative Party, but at the root of his many-sided nature there remains the essence of Liberalism. His tolerance, his sympathy with the oppressed and the underdog, his courage in withstanding clamour, his belief in the value of the individual and in self-government for communities sufficiently advanced to use it wisely, all derive from a heart and a head which made him in his early years of Ministerial office a Liberal statesman... Now that the ex-Liberal Minister has become leader of the Conservative Party, has he not carried into that body the reinvigorating spirit of English liberalism and so brought to fulfilment his father's notion that Toryism could be led into democratic channels? The content of national policy changes with time, but there is a profound sense in which Sir Winston Churchill, though a Conservative Prime Minister, is a Liberal still."

"[H]is ideas are to me reactionary, he is out of touch with modern social trends. But he has served his country with the highest distinction; in moments of peril he was undaunted; in majestic phrases, which linger in the memory of those who heard them, he crystallised the resolution of the whole nation."

"As we were leaving the House [of Commons] late tonight, he called me into the Chamber to take a last look round. All was darkness except a ring of faint light all around under the gallery. We could dimly see the table, but walls and roof were invisible. "Look at it", he said. "This little place is what makes the difference between us and Germany. It is in virtue of this that we shall muddle through to success & for lack of this Germany's brilliant efficiency leads her to final disaster. This little room is the shrine of the world's liberties.""

"Early in the afternoon [of 8 September 1940] I accompanied the Prime Minister on a tour of the East End, and then I saw the extraordinary spirit with which Londoners fought back... Although it was still early in the afternoon people were already coming in for the night, carrying their bedding and belongings, but they dropped them to the ground to cheer the Prime Minister. Putting his hat on the end of his stick he twirled it round and roared, "Are we downhearted?" and they shouted back, "No!" with astonishing gusto. "Hit 'em back, Winston!" the East Enders cried. "Hit 'em hard!" "Never fear," he answered in his most most bulldog way, "we'll hit back as soon as we can." Pessimists had predicted panic and bitterness in the East End, but I saw nothing of the kind. Smiles, cheers and grim determination showed already that "London could take it"."

"Even repeated by the announcer, it sent shivers (not of fear) down my spine. I think that one of the reasons why one is stirred by his Elizabethan phrases is that one feels the whole massive backing of power and resolve behind them, like a great fortress: they are never words for words' sake."

"[H]e became the greatest leader in war this country has ever had."

"An analogous process I shall call Churchillian Drift ... Whereas quotations with an apothegmatic feel are normally ascribed to Shaw, those with a more grandiose or belligerent tone are, as if by osmosis, credited to Churchill."

"[re Mulberry Harbours] You know that was Churchill’s idea. He has a hundred a day and about four of them are good."

"It is fun to be in the same decade with you."

"There is a great longing for leadership and even those who are far apart from you in general politics realize that you are the one man who has combined full realization of the dangers of our military position with belief in collective international action against aggression. And if we fail again now, will there ever be another chance."

"One of the reasons for the immense popularity of Churchill in 1940 was the not unfounded instinct of the common people that, but for him, their rulers would have betrayed them. There is a certain fallacy in attempting to decide what was Churchill's one crucial contribution to the survival of Britain. Great historical events are determined by a whole array of causes, each of which would be entitled in isolation to be regarded as crucial. But I feel sure that many people besides myself believe it was by being an immovable obstacle to compromise or surrender in 1940 that Churchill saved his country."

"His violent disagreement with Neville Chamberlain did not spring solely from thwarted ambition or personal dislike. Such motives may have sharpened the phrases and honed his epigrams, but the long policy of appeasement, the weakening of Britain's world role, the acceptance of oppression and racialism were to Churchill a denial of England's historical destiny and, because a denial, bound to end in disaster."

"He looked invincible, which he is. Tough, bulldogged, piercing. He made his way through the smoke, through the City workers all crying "Good old Winston" – "Give 'em socks" – "Good luck" – and the culminating cry of "Are we down-hearted?" to the heaven-rising response of "No-o-o-o-o" which echoed around the City, around the world indeed. It was magnificent, tremendous, stirring, dramatic."

"War not only has its own weapons, it has its own ethic, its own standard of right and wrong... Do whatever is necessary to win. This fact was emphasized in a recent statement by Winston S. Churchill, former first lord of the British admiralty: "When all is over, torture and cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian states had been able to deny themselves: and these were of doubtful utility.""