playwrights-from-switzerland

"A major power can afford a military debacle only when it looks like a political victory."

"The only remedy against hunger is reasonable birth control."

"Who sows fear, reaps weapons."

"That there is also freedom in captivity, only a prisoner can claim. Coming from a prison guard, this statement would be blasphemy."

"Freedom and justice are complementary concepts; freedom is no more feasible without justice than justice is possible without freedom."

"We do not consider patriotism desirable if it contradicts civilized behavior."

"Rea: My country, above all. Romulus: You see, you've been reading too many tragedies lately. Rea: But shouldn't one love one's country more than anything else in the world? Romulus: No, one should never love it as one loves other human beings. In fact, the most important thing is to mistrust one's country. No one turns killer more easily than one's country."

"Romulus: It is much more difficult to be loyal to a human being than to remain loyal to a state. Rea: It's my country, not just a state. Romulus: Every state calls itself "country" or "nation" when it is about to commit murder. Rea: Our unconditional love for our country was what made Rome great. Romulus: But it did not make Rome good. We nurtured a beast with our virtues. We became drunk on the greatness of our country, but what we loved has now turned into gall and wormwood."

"Eine Geschichte ist dann zu Ende gedacht, wenn sie ihre schlimmstmögliche Wendung genommen hat."

"The worst possible turn cannot be predicted. It occurs by chance."

"What can be said as a generalization about Dürrenmatt's dramatic oeuvre is that, from a dramaturgical point of view, it defies any sort of facile pigeonholing. He himself firmly denies that he belongs to any particular school of dramatic composition: there are elements of the absurd, classical tragedy, and even realism in his works. He says in 1954 that he is not "an existentialist, a nihilist, expressionist or ironist," and had he been writing later on he might well have added "absurdist" to the list. For him the stage is not a place for the working out of theories but a place for experiment, for developing the poetry and essence of the theater."

"They wanted what is possible only once: the now."

"Not to know one another to a degree that went beyond all possibility of knowing one another was beautiful."

"I know that I'm the happiest of lovers..."

"It is the secret that a man and a woman keep from each other that makes them a couple"

"He knows that every piece of selfknowledge which one cannot keep to oneself makes one smaller and smaller, he knows that he who cannot keep silent his wishes to be recognized in the greatness of his selfknowledge which is no selfknowledge if it cannot be kept silent, and one becomes hypersensitive one feels betrayed because one wants to be recognized by people, one becomes ridiculous ambitious in inverse ratio to ones selfknowledge"

"The monstruous paradox that people come closer to one another without words"

"We nest in an accident whose precarious balance, when we happen to become conscious of it, oppresses yet at the same time inspires us"

"To a certain degree we are really the person others have seen in us"

"Time does not change us it just unfolds us"

"Even silence becomes whether we want it or not a statement that is in fact astoundingly presumptuous"

"How can we ever judge a human being when he is and he will always be another person"

"Uniforms ruin every character"

"'Everything that is human looks like a special case'"

"Overcoming prejudice: the only possible way through love, which creates no graven images."

"The sort of misery that brings no moral reward, misery that is of no value to the mind and soul, that is the true misery, it is hopeless, bestial and nothing else."

"To write is to read one's own self"

"You hold the pen like a needle in a seismic observatory, and in fact it is not we who write, but rather we are written. Writing means to read oneself"

"A poem, a genuine one, does not need to fear the world; it stands up to it, even when a bell rings and an unexpected guest arrives to tell us, while the same coffee is still in our cups, of his fourteen years in captivity..."

"What we call unfaithfuless: our attempt for once to get out from behind our own face, our desperate hope of eluding the definitive."

"Does not everyone who describes something he has experienced believe basically that whatever happens to him has some sort of relevance."

"Half a lifetime is spent with the unspoken question: Will it happen will it not?"

"Finished things cease to be a shelter for the spirit; but work in progress is a delight"

"Wer sich nicht mit Politik befaßt, hat die politische Parteinahme, die er sich sparen möchte, bereits vollzogen: er dient der herrschenden Partei."

"(Present) it is a culture that strictly ignores present obligations and places itself entirely at the service of eternity"

"Why there are so many great actresses, so few great woman writers? The erotic urge that lies at the bottom of all art has a feminine and a masculine character. Feminine is the urge to be; masculine the urge to do. Interpretative art always has more of the feminine about it"

"People with the same education as my own, speaking the same words that I do, loving the same books, the same music, the same paintings, are by no means immune from the danger of turning into monsters and doing things we would not have thought possible among the people of our own day, apart from a few pathological exceptions. If they are not immune, Why should I be so confident of my own immunity?"

"One can be resolved to promote good, or one can be resolved to be a good person- Two separate things that are mutually exclusive"

"Your virtuous living is your enemy's best and cheapest weapon"

"What makes Shakespeare so overwhelming is the way in which the situation (who is confronting whom) is usually itself part of the composition, meaningful already as a situation"

"Theatrical effectiveness, I believe, lies in it's rarity its uniqueness"

"Plots- it seems there are thousands of them, all one's acquaintances known some, strangers make a present of them in letters, each the basis for a play or a novel..."

"That a plot has no real life of its own; it exists only in it's precipitates. It cannot be distilled but only crystallized- in which form it is then immutable, whether successful or unsuccessful: once and for all"

"Where the works gives scope for individuality, one sees a blossoming of self respect"

"How much frankness can we stand in a friend?"

"Nothing is harder than to accept oneself."

"I feel fairly certain that my hatred harms me more than the people whom I hate."

"What hope have you know given up ?"

"Are you friend with yourself ?"

"Do you know what you need?"