Social Democrats

"No people in any region would remain neglected . . . development of each and every person is important for the real and balanced development of the country."

"The BNP leader said we kept the people in the dark while signing the memoranda of understanding (MoUs). I have only one question to ask her: Whom did she consult when she signed the defence deal with China? No-one saw what was in it."

"I think that the friendship between Bangladesh and India is like a flowing river and full with generosity. This is the spirit of the people of the two neighbours. I think if our commitments are honest, we would be able to achieve many things that are beneficial to our people."

"My objective is to fulfil the dream of Bangabandhu through building a hunger- and poverty-free Golden Bangladesh being imbued with the spirit of the War of Liberation."

"It was an extremely heinous act. What kind of Muslims are these people? They don't have any religion, their only religion is terrorism."

"Responding to a question from reporters on quota reform"

"World leaders should keep their word, particularly the developed countries."

"All the democratic institutions are working and people are satisfied and people are enjoying it. So the way you say I am dominating, I am not dominating. I am serving people."

"My job is to assist the common people, I do politics for the people, not for me ... People are enjoying democracy now."

"[The fundamentalist groups] are trying, no doubt about it, and there are some people trying to encourage them, but we have controlled the situation."

"Maintaining decency, we could go anywhere and do all of our works -- Islam gives that liberty and scope to women ...women have to create their own fate and work out their own future."

"We want to come out of the vicious circle of unhealthy politics."

"The path you are following will not bring any benefit for the people. Instead you will lose public faith and confidence."

"I am urging the (BNP) leader to stop these bomb and grenade attacks, these acts of sabotage, and killings, of arson and damage to property."

"What do you want, that I should start crying, ‘Oh, crisis, we have a crisis!’ Do you want that?"

"Since my last tenure we have been trying to find the root causes of poverty and how we could reduce it. We wanted to ensure food security so we put all our force into producing more food and also the distribution system so that food should first reach to the poorest of the poor. Then we tried to create job opportunities for them in the rural areas."

"Like East Timor, they will carve out a Christian country taking parts of Bangladesh [Chattogram] and Myanmar with a base in the Bay of Bengal." Sheikh Hasina, the Awami League president, said in a meeting on Thursday, reported The Daily Star. It was the 14-party alliance's first meeting with the Awami League president after polls. "The offer came from a white man," Sheikh Hasina said without revealing any details. "It may appear that it is aimed at only one country, but it is not. I know where else they intend to go," she said that there will be more trouble but she is not worried about it. "If I allowed a certain country to build an airbase in Bangladesh, then I would have had no problem."

"Khaleda Zia said, "The Padma Bridge is being built in charlatan process, it will not rise there, it will collapse if you climb." And the one who has stopped the money of the bridge like Padma Bridge for the post of MD (Muhammad Yunus) should also be given two dunks in the Padma river and again put him on the bridge. Don't let him die. Then if they may be taught."

"The price of brinjal has gone above 110 taka. It has now come down to 80 taka. Instead of making brinjal fritters with brinjal, you can make it with other vegetables that are easily available. That's what we eat. 'You can make a very good brinjal fritters with sweet pumpkin instead of brinjal. We do it like this. That's how it can be done."

"If the grandchildren of the freedom fighters do not get job, then will the grandchildren of Razakar get it? My question is to the countrymen. Razakar's grandchildren will get jobs, will freedom fighters grandshildren not get job? what is their fault?"

"I am indeed rather residing very close to the country, so that I may probably silently enter by lucky chance at any time."

"No one knows the pain of losing a loved one more than I do."

"No one stay here."

"Rumors have been spread during the movement that Sheikh Hasina has fled. But I want to tell you that Sheikh Hasina has not fled, never flees."

"From now on, you will use the lethal weapon, shoot everyone you get. Wherever you see gathering from above... now I am making the (shooting) done from above, from the helicopter, it has already been started."

"The man receives four death sentences - yet lives nearly 90 years. He hadn't been to schools - yet he was as well learned and wise as the best professors. A great and confident man - yet modest and humble. He had friends from near and far - yet he was an independent lone wolf. Zen buddhist - yet a member of the Lutheran Church. Socialist - yet many capitalists were friends to him."

"Becoming aware, awakening, enlightenment, is possible right here and now, for everyone. From moment to moment, and yet only here and now, never sometimes, somewhere. Reality, God, is present here and now. The kingdom of heaven, blessedness, moksha, nirvana waits here and now. Outwardly nothing may happen, and yet a purely inner process can open up a new world, a new life, a new reality. - New? - Yes, really new, and yet as all those who have ever experienced it assert, at that moment we know that we have always been at home in that world, although we only now become aware of it."

"I will devote one third of my essence to the cooperative movement. But two thirds belong to humanity and myself. I will always practice new things, everything between heaven and earth. But a third I'm happy to give: and the rest two thirds supports greatly everything I can give to the cooperative movement."

"Humanity could live in peace - but it doesn't, because from the cradle we are taught to compete and fight, win, dominate and kill each other. These lessons and the world view behind them becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: a state of affairs is created where you have to compete, fight and kill."

"I promised to myself that I will never again obey anyone or any authority, government, gods or angels in anything else than in what I accept as the right or the best possible thing to do."

"The most conspicuous characteristic of Hitler’s personality, which became through his influence the pervading spirit of the whole of National Socialist ‘law’ as well, was a complete lack of any sense of truth or any sense of right and wrong."

"To be sure, one value comes with every positive-law statute without reference to its content: Any statute is always better than no statute at all, since it at least creates legal certainty. But legal certainty is not the only value that law must effectuate, nor is it the decisive value. Alongside legal certainty, there are two other values: purposiveness and justice. In ranking these values, we assign to last place the purposiveness of the law in serving the public benefit."

"Positivism, with its principle that ‘a law is a law’, has in fact rendered the German legal profession defenceless against statutes that are arbitrary and criminal. Positivism is, moreover, in and of itself wholly incapable of establishing the validity of statutes. It claims to have proved the validity of a statute simply by showing that the statute had sufficient power behind it to prevail. But while power may indeed serve as a basis for the ‘must’ of compulsion, it never serves as a basis for the ‘ought’ of obligation or for legal validity. Obligation and legal validity must be based, rather, on a value inherent in the statute."

"Of course it is true that the public benefit, along with justice, is an objective of the law. And of course laws have value in and of themselves, even bad laws: the value, namely, of securing the law against uncertainty."

"This view of a law and of its validity (we call it the positivistic theory) has rendered jurists and the people alike defenceless against arbitrary, cruel, or criminal laws, however extreme they might be. In the end, the positivistic theory equates law with power; there is law only where there is power."

"Concepts such as legal subject and legal object, legal relation and legal wrong, and indeed the very concept of law itself, are not accidental possessions of several or all legal orders but are necessary prerequisites if any legal order is to be understood as legal."

"The concept of law can be defined only as the reality tending toward the idea of law."

"It is the professional duty of the judge to validate the law’s claim to validity, to sacrifice his own sense of the right to the authoritative command of the law, to ask only what is legal and ask not if it is also just."

"The validity of demonstrably wrong law cannot conceivably be justified. However, any answer to the question of the purpose of law other than by enumerating the manifold partisan views about it has proved impossible— and it is precisely on that impossibility of any natural law, and on that alone, that the validity of positive law may be founded. At this point relativism, so far only the method of our approach, enters our system as a structural element. Ordering their living together cannot be left to the legal notions of the individuals who live together, since these different human beings will possibly issue contradictory directions. Rather, it must be uniformly governed by a transindividual authority. Since, however, in the relativistic view of reason and science are unable to fulfill that task, will and power must undertake it. If no one is able to determine what is just, somebody must lay down what is to be legal."

"As it is the essence of justice ultimately to shape those relations in the sense of equality, so it is essential to the legal precept in its meaning to be directed toward equality, to claim to be susceptible of generalization or to be general in character."

"Philosophy is not to relieve one of decisions, but to confront him with decisions. It is to make life not easy but, on the contrary, problematical."

"Because a judgement on the truth or error of the differing convictions in law is impossible, and because on the other hand a uniform law for all citizens is necessary, the law-giver faces the task of cleaving with a stroke of the sword the Gordian knot which jurisprudence cannot untangle. Since it is impossible to ascertain what is just, it must be decided what is lawful. In lieu of an act of truth (which is impossible) an act of authority is required. Relativism leads to positivism."

"The era of Schmidt and of his East German counterpart, Erich Honecker, Party Chief from 1971 and Chairman of the Council of State from 1976 to 1989, led to a sober, measured rapprochement and a resolution of relations between the two states. The West Germans sought to foster a German-German community of responsibility against the background of a reduction in international tension. Uneasiness in the early 1980s about the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in West Germany was a product of these attitudes. Nevertheless, as part of this community of responsibility, concern within West Germany about the plight of East Germans, let alone support for reunification, markedly declined, reflecting the extent to which the Germans had also been major players in creating the reality of two separate nations. There was no real West German support for the citizens’ rights movements in East Germany. Instead, stabilisation was more significant as a goal. The easing of relations thus entailed an acceptance of the governing system in Eastern Europe, for example of the suppression of the Czech Spring in 1968. East Germany, recognised for the first time as a state by much of the world in 1973, was admitted to the United Nations and other international bodies."

"“Anyone who votes for Die Grünen will be blaming themselves bitterly later on.” („Wer die Grünen wählt, der wird sich später mal bitterste Vorwürfe machen.“) — 1980, with regard to the formation of the political party Die Grünen"

"Immigration from foreign civilizations creates more problems than it can bring us in terms of positive factors on the labor market. Immigration from related civilizations, for example from Poland, is problem-free. From the Czech Republic, for example, is no problem. From Austria, for example, is no problem. From Italy is no problem. It starts with somewhat more eastern regions. Immigration from Anatolia, for example, is not entirely problem-free. Immigration from Afghanistan causes considerable problems. Immigration from Kazakhstan causes problems. These are other civilizations. Not because of their different genes, not because of their different ancestry, but because of the way they were brought up as infants, as toddlers, as schoolchildren, as children in the family."

"If you look closely, you'll see that the political journalists actually more belong to the political class and less to journalism."

"One is left, the other is right. But comparable populists are Lafontaine and Le Pen already."

"Of course, nuclear power has its risks. But there is no power and nothing in the world without risks, not even love."

"Intelligence services] are poor pigs suffering from two mental illnesses: The one disease is because they never get public recognition for what they actually do. This is inevitable, as they have to work in secret. This deformes the soul. The other disease bases on the fact that they have the tendency to believe they understood the national interests of their own country much better than their own government. This latter disease is the reason that I do not trust them."

"The rule of law does not have to win, it does not have to lose, but it has to exist!"