people-from-vienna

"Is it not permissible for a pope to pronounce a law unjust? Every newspaper arrogates to itself the right of stigmatizing the injustice of all laws, which do not agree with its partisan views."

"Doctrinaire formula-worship, that is our real enemy."

"We’re told we are bad. That’s inherent in us, so we have to be rigidly controlled by those on top."

"85% of our brain architecture is formed in the first five years."

"My research came out of my very early traumas. Out of questions like, does it really have to be this way? Does there have to be so much cruelty and violence, and insensitivity? Is it really, as we’re so often told, just human nature? Whether it’s original sin, or selfish genes, while they fight each other, it’s the same story, isn’t it?"

"I spoke at the United Nations General Assembly at a session organized by the State of Bolivia on harmony with nature, and I made the point that you can’t just tack on harmony with nature to a fundamentally imbalanced system."

"Einstein said it, you can’t solve problems with the same thinking that created them."

"I always believe in showing the benefits of change."

"Why do these people always have returning to a “traditional” male dominated, punitive family as a top priority?.. In these families children learn another basic lesson to fit into domination systems, which is why childrearing is so punitive. They learn that it is very, very painful to not obey orders, no matter how unjust, no matter how capricious. And they learn denial, because they’re dependent on the people who take care of them and who also cause them pain. So, they deflect their rage onto an out-group that some authority figure, whether it’s a Hitler, or a Trump, tells them is to blame. They have rigid thinking. Rigid sexual stereotypes, gender stereotypes."

"...The truth of the matter is the “traditional socialization” for men is never, never to be like a woman. In other words, the only emotions men get are contempt and anger. But to be real men, they can’t have the soft emotions. You know, vulnerability and the behaviors of caring."

"We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That's dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow to go through (higher education). If not, we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people. That's what happened in Germany. I saw it happen."

"I think that being an outsider has been very important for me because it made it possible for me to take a different look at the world we live in and at my place in it."

"...The male entitlement mentality, which we know today is behind some of the mass shootings."

"Religious orders have a great task in the dialogue between church and economy, because they themselves live in the economic world through their institutions and businesses. Monasteries are thus plantations of the edification of God's people and they become the guardians of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow."

"It is an elementary mistake to equate common Indo-European words with Proto-Indo- European words and to base thereon conclusions concerning the Proto-European Urvolk or Urheimat. Yet this is precisely what has often been done. . . . impassioned linguistic palaeontologists have gone even further. From the existence of certain items of vocabulary in all or a majority of the extant Indo-European languages, and blandly ignoring all the pitfalls just noted, they even fabricated conclusions concerning the social organization, the religion, the mores, the race of the Proto-Indo-European."

"We now find ourselves in possession of two entirely different items, both of which we call Proto-Indo-European: one, a set of reconstructed formulae not representative of any reality; the other, an undiscovered (possibly undiscoverable) language of whose reality we may be certain."

"Now the more sophisticated among us could easily object here that it would take a great deal of naivete on the part of linguistic palaeontologists to propound such views, . . . yet such naivete seems to enjoy the status of high acumen, as anyone can see who reads some of the numerous volumes that deal with the "Indo-Eutopeans," their lives and their mores. But if the authorship of such works is not astonishing enough, the uncritical and admiring credulity bestowed upon them by a vast number of scholars certainly is."

"We must not make the mistake of confusing our methods, and the results flowing from them, with the facts; we must not delude ourselves into believing that our retrogressive method of reconstruction matches, step by step, the real progression of linguistic history."

"No reputable linguist pretends that Proto-Indo-European reconstructions represent a reality, and the unpronounceability of the asterisked formulae is not a legitimate argument against reconstruction."

"Arguing about 'Proto-Indo-European' can be meaningful and fruitful . . . if we always explain whether we are talking about the one or the other— which, as we well know, we do not do."

"The journey of my life has been the constant search for escape from the feelings of insecurity as a refugee, which has never gone away."

"[S]he once tripped over and fell, literally, into the arms of President Kennedy. In Washington, she was frequently mistaken for Henry Kissinger's wife. On one occasion after her plane, which was also carrying President Nixon, nearly crashed on the way to Minsk, an absent-minded subeditor bylined her Hella Pinsk."

"[Willy Brandt] said: "Come back to my hotel room and we can talk." I went back and we sat down and he asked about my background and we talked and we talked and we talked. I didn't get out until three in the morning and everyone on the Guardian thought: "She must have gone to bed with him." Well, she didn't go to bed with him but she became completely reconciled to Germany because she had got to know Willy Brandt."

"When I started work, women who were doing any kind of political foreign affairs reporting were really very, very thin on the ground. You could really name them all."

"Many refugees who fled Austria before or during the Second World War still refuse to set foot there. But I, a Kindertransport survivor, have no compunction about visiting my native country and cannot recall being made to feel uncomfortable there."

"More than 64,000 Austrian Jews perished in the Holocaust. The fortunate were able to emigrate, but only after all their possessions had been seized. Several thousand Jewish children were saved and put onto the Kindertransport to Britain."

"It is not likely that such an important and energetic step could be taken without great results for his rule and his popularity. At the moment we are hardly in a position to judge the success and extent of it, but it certainly contains within itself the means to regenerate Mexico. The first problem that the new emperor will now have to solve will be that of satisfying the Liberal Party without alienating the affection of the Church."

"Will make good soldiers, very devoted to the government of Emperor Maximilian."

"This is how the Mexican Empire will perish, a creation based on the assumption of a southern triumph and which today finds itself singularly compromised by the opposite result. Even with a president less democratic than Mr. Johnson, the United States would never have tolerated the establishment at its gates of an absolute monarchy under the rule of a foreign dynasty. The misfortunes of the civil war did not allow them to oppose it when the facts were unfolding. Perhaps in order to avoid a war with France they will not attack the new order of things directly, but certainly they would do nothing to support it, and the disbandment of their armies will provide them with all the desirable means to overthrow it indirectly."

"It is claimed that it was the Archduchess Charlotte who determined her husband's final acceptance. The princess is young, beautiful, lively, and the noble ambition to wear a crown and found a dynasty would have seduced her."

"How did Emperor Maximilian spoil such a beautiful position in such a short time? He had been called in hatred of the Jewish liberals and acclaimed by the Catholics, who form the overwhelming majority of Mexicans, and he had nothing more in a hurry than to upset the Catholics and display sentiments of this false liberalism which can destroy, who cannot build anything."

"The enterprise that Archduke Maximilian will attempt remains what it was on the first day, an adventure where, besides a lot of energy, tact and resources, we must add a lot of happiness to succeed."

"Will you believe that I am not convinced that all the Mexican debt holders will be paid, that the Archduke will obtain from the Holy Father a concordat which satisfies the faith of the bishops and the population, that the silver mines will pay floods of this precious metal in the coffers of the emperor, that the Mexicans will become good and placid bourgeois like the Tyroleans of Brixen or Botrena."

"Maximilian fought like a hero, suffered like a hero and died a hero."

"Clearly, the role of women in the church is not an isolated instance but is part of a larger set of interrelated issues that will continue to engage the church for years to come. While not a first-order, salvation issue—no one is saved based on their view regarding women’s roles in the church—it is a matter of considerable practical and doctrinal consequence."

"We can only judge the fact in itself and this fact is deplorable, even less for the man who was its victim than for the cause which made him a martyr. His life was shattered; to continue her existence with the remorse and humiliation with which she would have been filled was the most cruel punishment that could be inflicted on her. We cannot say that his execution is a crime, but it is undoubtedly a political fault, like all extreme and violent acts, and what Republican Mexico will believe to have gained in security, it will lose in sympathy and in consideration. Despite the precedent of the condemnable decree against the Juarists, the republic will hardly wash away this cold spilled blood more than a month after the capture of this unfortunate prince. This sad fact will be rightly invoked and unfortunately exploited against the government of Juarez and those who will succeed it."

"Whatever opinion one forms of the enterprise to which Archduke Maximilian has just devoted his life, it is not possible for us Belgians to forget that the princess who shares the destinies of the new emperor is also the beloved daughter of our king, that she grew up among us, that our homeland is her own, and that she has the right to count on the sympathies and the wishes of her compatriots ."

"It is understandable that a colonial establishment organized under such conditions cannot fail to prosper. We are also convinced that the example of the Empress' s guards will be followed by a large number of our compatriots who, trusting with reason in the new situation in Mexico, will take advantage of all this set of circumstances so exceptionally advantageous, to to go bring the contribution of their arms and their intelligence to the beautiful work of civilization undertaken by the emperor Maximilian and the empress Charlotte, his august companion."

"Sacrified, betrayed, sold, Maximilian, whatever mistakes he made, deserves pity on his fate."

"Bolshevism, which once aspired to supplant tottering capitalism, is now in a state of incurable degeneration both at home in Russia and internationally."

"The dictatorships, whether Fascist or Bolshevist, have been able to conceal their innumerable defeats only by ruthlessly using both the gag and the lie."

"The succession of events since 1914 has swept away so many illusions that even a summary inspection of the heap of ideological ruins would demand the compilation of a veritable encyclopaedia. The summer of 1914 witnessed the collapse of all those hopes which had been built on a peaceful evolution of the capitalist world, and it also witnessed the breakdown of ."

"The world crisis which began in 1929, the longest ever known, caused people entirely unconnected with and even hostile to the working-class movement to speak of 'crisis' and even of the 'collapse of capitalism'. [...] The economic and financial smash of 1929 ruthlessly disposed of the illusion that capitalism was about to experience an era of lasting prosperity and harmony. Liberalism observed with horror that the actual course of ignored all its good advice. Today the doctrine of liberalism is practically dead, but, at least, its few remaining defenders can console themselves by noting the disastrous effects of ."

"Many people declare that democracy, too, is bankrupt. It is certainly true that democracy has lost much ground in recent years, and is now face to face with a serious crisis, but we do not believe that it is bankrupt."

"For almost a quarter of a century the affairs of the world and its ideas have been in indescribable confusion. In most cases the confusion of ideas is manifest without the aid of polemic or controversy. It is simple evidence of the chaotic state of the world."

"In the general collapse of values all around us it is not surprising that Marxism should also be subjected to critical attacks. A failure in the eyes of its enemies, even many of its friends admit that it is going through a severe crisis. Certain self-styled 'orthodox' Marxists, more in love with the letter than the spirit of the writings of Marx and Engels, have provided the less scrupulous critics of Marxism with weighty arguments. However, this category of 'academic Marxists' is becoming less and less numerous, and today we can observe their place being increasingly taken by people with far less knowledge and even greater pretensions: half-a-dozen quotations lifted from this or that popular pamphlet serve them instead of doctrine, and represent in their eyes the sum total of Marxist science. Most of the anti-Marxists of our day reveal the same intellectual poverty."

"The celebrated phrase, 'so much the worse for the facts', would satisfy only the high priests of Marxism, for Marxism also has its high priests, and these priests, like all others, daily deny the principles they claim to defend. Bolshevism is a living proof of this."

"Let us define what we mean by Marxism. Is it the doctrine of Marx and Engels? Or is it the movements to which that doctrine has given birth, and which, rightly or wrongly, claim to be Marxist? To what extent are these movements actually inspired by Marxism, and to what extent have they caused it to develop, sometimes reforming, sometimes deforming it? Are these movements still really Marxist in the classic sense? Or do perhaps both friends and enemies of Marxism often harbour a distorted conception of Marx’s original theories? We must therefore ask ourselves whether the so-called crisis of Marxism is not in large measure a crisis of differing posthumous interpretations of Marxism. Karl Marx died in 1883 and Friedrich Engels in 1895. Although a number of their followers have developed their doctrines and provided important supplementary analyses of the modifications experienced by capitalism in the course of the twentieth century, the results of these labours have hardly affected the movement as a whole. In fact, as the movement grew in size, the assimilation even of the ideas of Marx and Engels themselves, which were naturally better known, became slower, more fragmentary and more superficial. In accordance with historical conditions which obviously differed considerably as between country and country, each movement took what best suited it from the original doctrine, and applied its choice (very rarely the Marxist method itself) to its own particular situation."

"In this sense we can speak of a 'decomposition' of Marxism. In ignoring the important fundamental contribution of the followers of Marx, and by insisting exclusively on the phenomenon of superficial adaptation and variation, Sorel passed in silence over all that was healthy, live and fruitful in the Marxist doctrine."

"Marxism is not a dogma at all; it is a method of investigation. Seeing that the conditions of our day differ considerably from those studied by Marx, what are the new problems which contemporary Marxism has to solve? They certainly cannot be solved by reeling off a few quotations learned by heart."