Famous Quotes

Quotes by Friedrich Durrenmatt

• A major power can afford a military debacle only when it looks like a political victory.
• Before anything else, we need a new age of Enlightenment. Our present political systems must relinquish their claims on truth, justice and freedom and have to replace them with the search for truth, justice, freedom and reason.
• Emotions have no place in business, unless you do business with them.
• Everything that is necessary is also easy. You just have to accept it. And the most necessary, the most natural matter on this planet is death.
• In a society which is structured the wrong way, piety has no effect.
• It is inhuman to continue a war which could easily be ended.
• News reports don't change the world. Only facts change it, and those have already happened when we get the news.
• Only the freedom of mind can prevent the state from becoming totalitarian and from issuing totalitarian demands.
• Our science has become terrible, our research dangerous, our findings deadly. We physicists have to make peace with reality. Reality is not as strong as we are. We will ruin reality.
• Power is paradoxical.
• Pretend to be dumb, that's the only way to reach old age.
• Religion and political expediency go beautifully hand in hand.
• Revolutions demand enormous sacrifices and, at the same time, create a new need to change the world again.
• So then learn to conquer your fear. This is the only art we have to master nowadays: to look at things without fear, and to fearlessly do right.
• The freedom of each individual can only be the freedom of all.
• The world is bad but not without hope. It is only hopeless when you look at it from an ideal viewpoint.
• We do not consider patriotism desirable if it contradicts civilized behavior.
• When death has you by the throat, you don't mince words.
• Who sows fear, reaps weapons.
• Whoever is content with the world, and who profits from its lack of justice, does not want to change it.
• World history is tragic.