"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!"
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Marginal note (10 March 1918), quoted in John C. G. Röhl, Wilhelm II: Into the Abyss of War and Exile 1900-1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 1161-1162
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wilhelm_II%2C_German_Emperor
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Wilhelm II, German Emperor
Wilhelm II of Germany (27 January 1859 – 4 June 1941), born Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albert von Preußen, was the last German Emperor (Kaiser) and the last King (König) of Prussia, ruling from 1888 to 1918. He abdicated during the November Revolution, and fled to exile in the Netherlands.
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