Quotes & Sayings About Berlin

45,000 sections of reinforced concrete - three tons each.
Nearly 300 watchtowers.
Over 250 dog runs.
Twenty bunkers.
Sixty five miles of anti-vehicle trenches - signal wire, barbed wire, beds of nails.
Over 11,000 armed guards.
A death strip of sand, well-raked to reveal footprints.
200 ordinary people shot dead following attempts to escape the communist regime.
96 miles of concrete wall.

Not your typical holiday destination.

JF Kennedy said the Berlin Wall was a better option than a war. In TDTL, the Anglo-German Bishop family from the pebbledashed English suburb of Oaking argue about this - among other - notions while driving to Cold War Berlin, through all the border checks, with a plan to visit both sides of it. — Joanna Campbell

The most passionate, consistent, extreme and implacable enemy of the Enlightenment and ... all forms of rationalism ... was Johann Georg Hamann. His influence, direct and indirect, upon the romantic revolt against universalism and scientific method ... was considerable and perhaps crucial. — Isaiah Berlin

I think the political class in Berlin doesn't need to be supervised and monitored by intelligence services in order to find out what they're thinking. Just go to lunch with them, go to dinner with them, or read the papers. — Angela Merkel

Liberty and equality, spontaneity and security, happiness and knowledge, mercy and justice - all these are ultimate human values, sought for themselves alone; yet when they are incompatible, they cannot all be attained, choices must be made, sometimes tragic losses accepted in the pursuit of some preferred ultimate end. — Isaiah Berlin

Understanding men or ideas or movements, or the outlooks of individuals or groups, is not reducible to a sociological classification into types of behaviour with predictions based on scientific experiment and carefully tabulated statistics of observations. — Isaiah Berlin

The romanticism and sentimentality in the relationship between Paris and Berlin is likely to vanish. It's the way it is with an old, married couple, although the established habits will remain in place. — Max Gallo

The fall of the Berlin Wall makes for nice pictures. But it all started in the shipyards. — Lech Walesa

Berlin is my favourite city. — Logan Lerman

In 2013, we opened our first international office in London and established a European hub in Berlin. — Jon Oringer

As far as songwriters, I've always been a fan of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and George Gershwin; those guys mean a lot to me. — Mel Brooks

I exaggerate a lot and I get fiction and reality mixed up, but I don't actually ever lie. — Lucia Berlin

Winston and his sister walked for a time in silence, each in an invisible, vibrating pocket of excitement. — Eric Berlin

We have also an edition of The Trial, by the notorious Jew, Kafka. Berlin would appreciate it, I am thinking, if this too was added to the bonfire. Also the works of that decadent lesbian Bolshevik, Jane Austen. — Stephen Fry

Actually, what she remembered most about that trip to Berlin was kissing a handsome, brown-haired German boy in a nightclub. He kept taking ice cubes from his drink and running them across her collarbone, which at the time had seemed incredibly sexy, but now seemed unhygienic and sticky. — Liane Moriarty

People know Detroit for the cars, but the suburban areas of the city are really beautiful. It's much more inhabitable than people think. Many believe it's like Berlin at the end of World War II. — Leonard Slatkin

Mrs. Bevins smiled. "Okay. I'll cop. I think every teacher sees this sometimes. It's not simply intelligence or talent. It's a nobility of spirit. A quality which could make him great at whatever he wanted to do." We — Lucia Berlin

In a lot of ways Berlin is a symbol for me of Facebook's mission: bringing people together, connecting people and breaking down boundaries. — Mark Zuckerberg

To those who charge that liberalism has been tried and found wanting, I answer that the failure is not in the idea, but in the course of recent history. The New Deal was ended by World War II. The New Frontier was closed by Berlin and Cuba almost before it was opened. And the Great Society lost its greatness in the jungles of Indochina. — George McGovern

The view that the truth is one and undivided, and the same for all men everywhere at all times, whether one finds it in the pronouncements of sacred books, traditional wisdom, the authority of churches, democratic majorities, observation and experiment conducted by qualified experts, or the convictions of simple folks uncorrupted by civilisation
this view, in one form or another, is central to western thought, which stems from Plato and his disciples. — Isaiah Berlin

Ernst was still in the Eastern Zone, about ninety kilometres from Berlin, when the truck emerged so inexplicably out of nowhere that it seemed to have been created by the rain itself. — Mordecai Richler

I have a fear of nuclear annihilation. I'm a child of the cold war: I didn't live more than 10 miles from a major WarPac nuclear target until the Berlin Wall came down and the CW ended. Knowing you can die horribly at any moment because of decisions made by alien intelligences thousands of miles away who don't even know you exist - there's something Lovecraftian about that, isn't there? — Charles Stross

War is a farmer's son from Kansas trying to kill a factory worker's son from Berlin, with neither of them knowing why. — Randall Wallace

I was lucky because on the morning after the burning of the Reichstag I left my home very early to catch a train to Berlin for the conference of our student organization and that is the only reason why I escaped arrest. — Klaus Fuchs

I remember Berlin. Berlin to me was the star of the film. I loved for six months that we filmed there. — Marton Csokas

In Germany air became generally accepted Berlin in this area. It operated with 45 airplanes within the Low Cost range from Germany, and is one the most successful carriers in Europe. — Niki Lauda

The obvious precedent for Beijing 2008 was the Berlin Olympics, in 1936. Both were showcases for a muscle-flexing nation, although Hitler made an elementary error when he chose not to dress his young National Socialists in lime-green catsuits laced with twinkling fairy lights. — Anthony Lane

In Berlin I especially enjoyed the orchestral concerts, and I attended a large number of them. I formed the acquaintance of a good many musicians, several of whom spoke of my playing in high terms. — James Weldon Johnson

After you get what you want you don't want it. — Irving Berlin

Jewelry and clothes for Isabel and Polly. A piece of the Berlin Wall for Esther. — Liane Moriarty

I studied German at school. I lived in Berlin for two years and had a German girlfriend for five years, so I don't find speaking German particularly difficult. Singing was slightly more difficult. — Martin Gore

It's financially advantageous to make a picture in Berlin, Germany. They have a very effective rebate system. — Joel Silver

Tolstoy wrote, 'The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.' He understood this service as a religious duty. For me, I understand it as a fact of life, as THE fact of life. What we do for each other is what survives. My sister is dead, but everything she did for me while she was alive is still going strong. I can still feel her hand reaching across the backseat of our car in Berlin, and I still hear her voice, our conversations going late into the night. — Nina Sankovitch

She can look at you and make you feel like you're the only one in the world. Even if it's not true, she can make you feel that way. And with her child, it would be true. She would look at her child for as long as her child needed. — Adam Berlin

I think that, certainly, most of my operatic roles are in German. I think it happened because, of course, I was lucky in that I was invited to sing, first of all, my operatic debut in Berlin at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, which was West Berlin at the time. — Jessye Norman

For some reason, lots of terrible things start here and then spread. The Cold War was one. It didn't start in Berlin - it started in Athens in December 1944; the contagion in the eurozone started here in 2010. We are perfectly capable as Europeans of messing things up unnecessarily. — Yanis Varoufakis

True knowledge is knowledge of why things are as they are, and not merely what they are. — Isaiah Berlin

If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict - and of tragedy - can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social. The necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable characteristic of the human condition. This gives its value to freedom as Acton conceived of it - as an end in itself, and not as a temporary need, arising out of our confused notions and irrational and disordered lives, a predicament which a panacea could one day put right — Isaiah Berlin

The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds. — Isaiah Berlin

Usually the German translators do something terrible, especially with Tom Wolfe, which is that they make it local. So if the characters are from Harlem, the translators put all this Berlin slang into their mouths, and that's just terrible. You cringe when you read that. But there really is no good solution to the problem, except learning English. — Daniel Kehlmann

In Berlin, I worked from home, were the only other women sat sedately on my bookshelves. They were good company, it has to be said, but a little quiet. — Luisa Weiss

I liked Germany; I'm not into Berlin, it's too huge and empty and imposing, but Munich was good. — Graham Coxon

In 1914, I believe, the excitement in Berlin on the first day of the World War was tremendous. Today, no excitement, no hurrahs, no cheering, no throwing of flowers, no war fever, no war hysteria. There is not even any hate for the French and British - despite Hitler's various proclamations to the people, the party, the East Army, the West Army, accusing the "English warmongers and capitalistic Jews" of starting this war. When I passed the French and British embassies this afternoon, the sidewalk in front of each of them was deserted. A lone Schupo paced up and down before each. — William L. Shirer

I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting ... it was the start of a new Arab world.. The Berlin Wall has fallen. — Walid Jumblatt

Consider a resident of Berlin, born in 1900 and living to the ripe age of one hundred. She spent her childhood in the Hohenzollern Empire of William II; her adult years in the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Third Reich and Communist East Germany; and she died a citizen of a democratic and reunified Germany. She had managed to be a part of five very different sociopolitical systems, though her DNA remained exactly the same. — Yuval Noah Harari

I don't think this kind of thing [satire] has an impact on the unconverted, frankly. It's not even preaching to the converted; it's titillating the converted. I think the people who say we need satire often mean, 'We need satire of them, not of us.' I'm fond of quoting Peter Cook, who talked about the satirical Berlin cabarets of the '30s, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the Second World War. — Tom Lehrer

Fr. 2
All We as Leaves
He (following Homer) compares man's life with the leaves.
All we as leaves in the shock of it:
spring-
one dull gold bounce and you're there.
You see the sun? - I built that.
As a lad. The Fates lashing their tails in a corner.
But (let me think) wasn't it a hotel in Chicago where I had the first of those - my body walking out of the room
bent on some deadly errand
and me up on the ceiling just sort of fading out-
brainsex paintings I used to call them?
In the days when I (so to speak) painted.
Remember
that oddly wonderful chocolate we got in East
(as it was then) Berlin? — Anne Carson

I went to Berlin for a year and a half, and that's where I learned about culture and art and everything. Before that, I lived in total absence of culture. I come from a house where there was nothing like reading or art. — Lea Seydoux

There was a cabaret, and there was a master of ceremonies... and there was a city called Berlin, in a country called Germany...and it was the end of the world. — Joe Masteroff

Being a Berlin cop in 1942 was a little like putting down mousetraps in a cage full of tigers. — Philip Kerr

MARTHA'S CHEERY VIEW of things was widely shared by outsiders visiting Germany and especially Berlin. The fact was that on most days in most neighborhoods the city looked and functioned as it always had. — Erik Larson

The Berlin Defence suited my strategy for the match. I had a defensive strategy - Actually, I had in my pocket some other sharper stuff to fall back on - but first I wanted to try the defensive strategy with Black and it worked so well. — Vladimir Kramnik

Friedrich Nietzsche got pretty hung up on the notion of human will; really all he needed were some running shoes, Lycra and a place in the Berlin Marathon. — Phil Hewitt

Anybody says he knows just how someone else feels is a fool. — Lucia Berlin

There's a great tradition among the English of writing about Berlin. It's kind of a state of mind, almost. That even translates in terms of music. A lot of people go to Berlin with the idea that it's a state of mind. — Philip Kerr

Romanticism embodied a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness, a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual movement and change, an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals. — Isaiah Berlin

It won't be a volcano that ends man's existence on this planet. It'll be the no-win no-fee lawyers. They are the ones who brought Europe to a halt last week. They are the ones who made a simple trip from Berlin to London into a five-country, all-day hammer blow on your licence fee. They are the ones who must be stopped. — Jeremy Clarkson

The history of society is the history of the inventive labors that man alter man, alter his desires, habits, outlook, relationships both to other men and to physical nature, with which man is in perpetual physical and technological metabolism. — Isaiah Berlin

Let me give you the balance sheet of this war: fifty great men to go down in the annals of history; millions of dead who won't be mentioned any more; and one thousand millionaires who lay down the law. A soldier's life is worth about fifty francs in the wallet of some fat industrialist in London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Vienna or anywhere else. Are you getting the picture?' 'So — Gabriel Chevallier

I consider myself the queen of pugs of New York City. I'm really into my dogs. Massive pugs, massive needlepoint, massive color! — Brigid Berlin

I'll never forget the first screening at the Berlin Film Festival. As soon as the film ended there was an outbreak of booing, which made us look at each other with some surprise. — John Schlesinger

The Berlin Wall fell because the East Germans saw the West had more. The Koreans don't like the Japanese and try to prove to them that they are worth more in the industrial arena. — Stef Wertheimer

The day my father killed off my mother was the day he stopped knowing me. — Lucia Berlin

He never spoke of himself, and in a conversation with Miss Norton divulged the pleasing fact. From her Jo learned it, and liked it all the better because Mr. Bhaer had never told it. She felt proud to know that he was an honored Professor in Berlin, though only a poor language-master in America, and his homely, hard-working life was much beautified by the spice of romance which this discovery gave it. — Louisa May Alcott

Life may be seen through many windows, none of them necessarily clear or opaque, less or more distorting than any of the others. — Isaiah Berlin

Isaiah Berlin once said that there are two kinds of writers, hedgehogs and foxes. He said the fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows just one thing. So Shakespeare is a typical fox; Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are typical hedgehogs. Now, I'm a typical hedgehog. I know just one thing, and I repeat it over and over again. I try to approach it from different angles to make it look different, but it's the same thing. — Colin Wilson

As a five-year-old in Berlin in 1965, I didn't know that funny women existed. It wasn't until I got back to England that I realised women could be funny. — Jenny Eclair

The fall of the Berlin Wall did more for the progress of freedom than all of the books written by myself or Friedrich Hayek or others. — Milton Friedman

When I was a kid, while touring East Berlin - back when there was an East Berlin - I got my left foot stuck in an escalator in Alexanderplatz. A few hours later, thanks to blowtorches and chainsaws and East German soldiers and the U.S. Embassy, my foot was released, and I along with it. — Kevin Bleyer

From the Berlin tenement reform law of 1897 to H. P. Berlage's plan for Amsterdam South of 1917, designers and theorists in Germany and Holland moved toward the development of a perimeter residential block that would preserve the plastic continuity of the street while opening up the resultant courtyard for use as an enclosed semi-public space. — Kenneth Frampton

My father loved to take us on historical vacations, and you should have seen the stares we received in East Berlin. — Marcus Samuelsson

Fontenelle was the most civilized man of his time, and indeed of most times. — Isaiah Berlin

We cannot negotiate with people who say what's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable.
[ The Berlin Crisis: Radio and Television Address to the American People (The White House, July 25, 1961)] — John F. Kennedy

Books that Uncle bought in Odessa or acquired in Heidelberg, books that he discovered in Lausanne or found in Berlin or Warsaw, books he ordered from America and books the like of which exist nowhere but in the Vatican Library, in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, classical and modern Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, medieval Arabic, Russian, English, German, Spanish, Polish, French, Italian, and languages and dialects I had never even heard of, like Ugaritic and Slovene, Maltese and Old Church Slavonic. — Amos Oz

(Advice to cleaning women: Take everything that your lady gives you and say Thank you. You can leave it on the bus, in the crack.) — Lucia Berlin

Of course, like all over-simple classifications of this type, the dichotomy becomes, if pressed, artificial, scholastic and ultimately absurd. But if it is not an aid to serious criticism, neither should it be rejected as being merely superficial or frivolous: like all distinctions which embody any degree of truth, it offers a point of view from which to look and compare, a starting-point for genuine investigation. — Isaiah Berlin

When the Berlin Wall came down the Americans cried, 'Victory,' and walked off the field. — Paul Keating

There has been studies looking at like musical talent and it shows that there is actually a really large genetic component involved. — H. A. Berlin

No one can compare us to the apartheid regime. It's not like in South Africa between the blacks and the whites who belong to the same nation, or in Berlin where you find parents living on the eastern side and their children in the western side. — Silvan Shalom

Abundance in life is achieved only when we tear down walls and fill our lives with light. — Seth Adam Smith

It's soul force that removed the English from India. It's soul force that brought down the Berlin Wall. It's soul force that gave life to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s struggle for civil rights. — Marianne Williamson

I live between Barcelona and Berlin. Staying in Spain over the winter and Berlin for spring and summer is an ideal combination. — Daniel Bruhl

By seizing the formerly little-known Height 102.0 - the Mamayev Hill - the Red Army fought its way to the fascists' den - Berlin. We are proud to say that our victory in Stalingrad radically changed the whole situation in the Second World War. And this victory meant that our Motherland had withstood one of the most difficult tests in its history. — Aleksandr Vasilevsky

I think graffiti is part of Berlin culture. You think about what the Berlin wall meant and how visible that was in everyone's life. How it was a part of their very identity. — Ian Bremmer

With the Berlin I was able to set up a fortress that he could come near but not breach. — Vladimir Kramnik

Life is 10 percent what you make it, and 90 percent how you take it. — Irving Berlin

Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible. — Isaiah Berlin

Our attitudes control our lives. Attitudes are a secret power working twenty-four hours a day, for good or bad. It is of paramount importance that we know how to harness and control this great force. — Irving Berlin

As we say in Berlin, there are many ways to bake a parrot. — Erik Spiekermann

Look at what has occurred in history. When the Berlin Wall fell, it was not surprising, but it was unexpected. Who predicted the Arab Spring? Nobody expected it, but all the ingredients were there. I think all the ingredients are also there for Quebec to become a country. But when? That's another question. — Gilles Duceppe

Whatever your passion is - even if you're great at it - it can't be the only thing you do... If you do, you'll be great at that one thing... and bad at everything else... Getting that balance is not easy... — Eric Berlin

If you are planning a visit to Europe, you're probably thinking about Berlin, but if you've never been to Berlin, you're actually thinking about Warsaw. If you have been to Berlin, you'll feel you've gone back in time 10 years. Either way, there's no travel like business travel, and there's no better excuse to visit Warsaw than MCE. Be sure to visit the museum of the Warsaw resistance while you're there to learn some things about World War 2 they left out of your textbook. — Mike Lee

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin sagely pointed out, liberty for wolves means death to lambs.124 — Naomi Oreskes

The plan shows that the twenty million people in the German democratic Republic and in the democratic sector of Berlin think only of peace, and that they are working for freedom and peaceful prosperity. — Walter Ulbricht

More than any of the other new states that came into being at war's end, Poland changed the balance of power in eastern Europe. It was not large enough to be a great power, but it was large enough to be a problem for any great power with plans of expansion. It separated Russia from Germany, for the first time in more than a century. Poland's very existence created a buffer to both Russian and German power, and was much resented in Moscow and Berlin. — Timothy Snyder

I spent time on set in New York and Berlin sitting next to Steven Spielberg while he worked, which was the biggest thrill of my life. — Matt Charman

Got no checkbooks, got no banks. Still I'd like to express my thanks - I've got the sun in the mornin' and the moon at night. — Irving Berlin

Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things than I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths. — Joseph Goebbels

Berlin seems like a place of healing to me though: you have both the Holocaust Memorial and Hiroshima Strasse side-by-side there. You have the whole last century libraried and you can see exactly what we did. Now there's lots of artists and musicians moving there because they can't afford the rent in London and New York, and they're having children and making it a gentle place. It seems to be a place of hope now. — Robert Montgomery

After the Berlin Wall came down I visited that city and I will never forget it. The abandoned checkpoints. The sense of excitement about the future. The knowledge that a great continent was coming together. Healing those wounds of our history is the central story of the European Union. — David Cameron

Of course the Silicon Valley is unique and Berlin is not yet comparable. But of all the different cities that are building a startup infrastructure, Berlin is the one with the most similar energy. — Mark Zuckerberg