Quotes & Sayings About Frankfurt

Is truth something that in fact we do - and should - especially care about? Or is the love of truth, as professed by so many distinguished thinkers and writers, itself merely another example of bullshit? — Harry G. Frankfurt

Frankfurt's big problem is that London is a much more attractive and interesting place to live, especially for the demographic who work in finance: as a former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, put it, Young men want to go out on the pull and do a lot of cocaine, and they can't really do that easily in Frankfurt. — John Lanchester

I used to teach at Yale, which was at one time a center of postmodernist literary theory. Derrida was there. Paul de Man was there. — Harry Frankfurt

You could grow up in Germany in the postwar years without ever meeting a Jewish person. There were small communities in Frankfurt or Berlin, but in a provincial town in south Germany, Jewish people didn't exist. — W.G. Sebald

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
[Speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade), Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003] — Susan Sontag

I was raised in Brooklyn and in Baltimore. My father was a bookkeeper. When I was 36 years old, my mother told me I was adopted. — Harry Frankfurt

We discovered that in connection with these figures the German national simpletons and money-grubbers of the Frankfurt parliamentary swamp always counted as Germans the Polish Jews as well, although this dirtiest of all races, neither by its jargon nor by its descent, but at most only through its lust for profit, could have any relation of kinship with Frankfurt. — Friedrich Engels

If we go to Frankfurt together it won't be long, I'm sure, before I love you. I'm not like you; it takes me longer than two days to fall in love with someone. If you're patient, if you don't break my heart with your Turkish jealousies, I'll love you deeply. — Orhan Pamuk

If my father hadn't come to America about 35 years ago, I'd be starving in Poland . . . I'd be sobbing in France . . . I'd be stealing in Greece . . . I'd be shivering in Belgrade . . . I'd be slaving in Frankfurt . . . I'd be hiding in Prague . . . I'd be buried in Russia. But here he was, alive and walking on his own two feet. — Ann Howard Creel

The Frankfurt Galaxy( The NFL Europe team) always had tremendous success, at that time there were 2,000 American football clubs in Europe playing the game from juniors through to adults. — Bill Peterson

No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding. — W.G. Sebald

The notion of carefully wrought bullshit involves, then, a certain inner
strain. Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and objectivity. It entails accepting standards and limitations that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim. It is this selflessness that, in connection with bullshit, strikes us as inapposite. But in fact it is not out of the question at all. The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept. And in these realms there are exquisitely sophisticated craftsmen who - with the help of advanced and demanding techniques of market research, of public opinion polling, of psychological testing, and so forth - dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly right. — Harry G. Frankfurt

Recognizing truth requires selflessness. You have to leave yourself out of it so you can find out the way things are in themselves, not the way they look to you or how you feel about them or how you would like them to be. — Harry Frankfurt

Being the first black Nobel laureate, and the first African, the African world considered me personal property. I lost the remaining shreds of my anonymity, even to walk a few yards in London, Paris or Frankfurt without being stopped. — Wole Soyinka

Bullshit is unavoidable when circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus, the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person's obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled-whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others - to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. — Harry Frankfurt

When an Occupy demo in the centre of Frankfurt makes world news, I shall hurry to join in. — Nigel Farage

Auteuil (the southern sector of Paris's then-rustic 16th arrondissement) at the home of his great-uncle, two months after the Treaty of Frankfurt formally ended the Franco-Prussian W — Marcel Proust

Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer

Political correctness is a war on noticing. — Steve Sailer

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. — Harry G. Frankfurt

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstance require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. — Harry G. Frankfurt

It may be no surprise that Pittsburgh has direct flights to London, Paris and Frankfurt, but consider this: many of the tourists here have come from Europe to the capital of culture in the Alleghenies. — Bill Dedman

Morality can provide at most only a severely limited and insufficient answer to the question of how a person should live. — Harry G. Frankfurt

Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. — Harry G. Frankfurt

Heidi loudly wailed, Oh I want to go home. What the poor snowhopper will do without me? Grandmother is waiting for me everyday. Poor Thistlefinch gets blows if Peter gets no cheese, and I must see the sun again when he says good-night to the mountains. How the eagle would screech if he saw all the people here in Frankfurt. — Johanna Spyri

The fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him ... He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose. — Harry Frankfurt

For a small open economy that trades mostly with the euro zone it makes absolute sense to be part of the currency union. Our currency has already pegged to the euro since 2002. We don't have an independent monetary policy. We are regulated by the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, but we are not able to reap all the profits. Our businesses want to save the transaction costs. — Dalia Grybauskaite

However, it must not be assumed that bullshit always and necessarily has pretentiousness as its motive. — Harry G. Frankfurt

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.
[Address in the Assembly Hall at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, June 26 1963] — John F. Kennedy

After all, every use of language without exception has some, if not all, of the characteristic features of lies. — Harry G. Frankfurt

Civilizations ... cannot flourish if they are beset with troublesome infections of mistaken beliefs. — Harry G. Frankfurt

There are significant relationships, of course, between wanting things and caring about them..The notion of caring is in large part constructed out of the notion of desire. Caring about something may be, in the end, nothing more than a certain complex mode of wanting it. However, simply attributing desire to a person does not in itself convey that the person cares about the object he desires. — Harry G. Frankfurt

To establish and to sustain an advanced culture, we need to avoid being debilitated either by error or by ignorance. We need to know - and, of course, we must also understand how to make productive use of - a great many truths. — Harry G. Frankfurt

Frankfurt, discussing a stuntman: He missed being killed in that shot be literally half an inch. — Guillermo Del Toro

I've lost bags all over the world and had cases end up in London, Frankfurt, Los Angeles and Miami. — Brigitte Nielsen

The Delta agent saw my itinerary and said, 'You're flying to Jakarta via Atlanta, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur? You must have really pissed off your travel agent. — Tucker Elliot

The Frankfurt School masterminds for indoctrination into collectivist mindsets. Those men's understanding of human psychology was infallible: Ideas that the general public sees and hears on a repetitive basis will eventually achieve agreement with the ideas put forth or impair the individual judgment necessary to refute them. — Alexandra York

The Frankfurt Museum of Decorative Arts is a handsome building, which takes its cues from the riverside Biedermeier villa next to it, and it is well-integrated into an overall scheme for a group of small museums. — Martin Filler

Once, [Rabbi Chanoch] Teller was traveling with 16 of his [18] offspring ... while changing planes in Frankfurt, Teller noticed a German woman gaping.
'Are all of these your children?' the woman asked. 'From one wife?'
'Yes, God has blessed me with all these children,' the rabbi replied.
'Haven't you heard about the population problem?'the woman sniffed. 'How many more children do you want to have?'
Rabbi Teller paused and looked the woman in the eye: 'About 6 million,' he said. — Lynn Vincent

If you erased New York, I hate to say it, if you erased Frankfurt, even London, the world would not have changed. — Nicolas Berggruen

cursing, the delicate use of profanities, and some good basic slang to help you navigate the world of spoken German. So when a drunk harasses you in a Frankfurt bar, you'll know just how to tell him to "get lost" or "fuck off" (whichever you prefer); when a woman speaks to you of her Muschi, you'll know that she is either talking about her cat or a part of her own anatomy (you be the judge); and when the hitchhiker you picked up on the autobahn yells, Vorsicht! Bullen!, you'll know he is not warning you of cattle crossing the road but of the police. — Gertrude Besserwisser

Taxi-drivers in Frankfurt are said to dislike the annual Book Fair because literary folk, instead of being shuttled to prostitutes like respectable members of other convening professions, prefer to stay in their hotels and fuck one another — Julian Barnes

Like the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, postmodernism seeks to institutionalize dishonesty as a legitimate school of thought. The idea of truth as the ultimate goal of the intellectual is discarded. In its place, scholars are asked to pursue political objectives
so long as those political objectives are the 'correct' ones. Postmodernism is not fringe within the community of scholars. It is central. This tells us a great deal about the life of the mind today. Peruse any university course catalogue, and you find names like Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes. Scour the footnotes of scholarly books and journals and a similar story unfolds. With the primacy of philosophies
postmodernism, Critical Theory, and even the right-leaning Straussianism
that exalt dishonesty in the service of supposedly noble causes, is it at all surprising that liars like Alfred Kinsey, Rigoberta Menchu, Alger Hiss, and Margaret Sanger have achieved a venerated status among the intellectuals? — Daniel J. Flynn

It is only because a person has volitions of the second order that he is capable both of enjoying and of lacking freedom of the will. — Harry Frankfurt

Most people are flying to Heathrow because it's a hub, so they can fly on to other places, often long-distance flights. If they can't go on those long-distance flights from Heathrow, they will go to Paris, they will go to Amsterdam, they will go to Frankfurt, because those are viable alternatives. — Geoff Hoon

As Lenin put it, "Through the schools we will transform the old world... the final victory will belong to the schools... the final sketch plan of the socialist society will belong to the schools." So the Frankfurt School targeted and took control of the teachers' colleges in order to control what was being taught to children.
...young teachers are forced to go through possibly the most rigorous courses of indoctrination available in any universities. — Anna Sofia Botkin

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. — Harry G. Frankfurt

Although the frankfurter originated in Frankfurt, Germany, we have long since made it our own, a twin pillar of democracy along with Mom's apple pie. In fact, now that Mom's apple pie comes frozen and baked by somebody who isn't Mom, the hot dog stands alone. What it symbolizes remains pure, even if what it contains does not. — William Zinsser

Location is everything, I'd rather camp in the Lake District or Scotland than sit in a five-star hotel in Frankfurt. — Rory Bremner

We cannot think of ourselves as creatures whose rationality endows us with an especially significant advantage over others - indeed, we cannot think of ourselves as rational creatures at all - unless we think of ourselves as creatures who recognize that facts, and true statements about the facts, are indispensable in providing us with reasons for believing (or for not believing) various things and for taking (or for not taking) various actions. If we have no respect for the distinction between true and false, we may as well kiss our much-vaunted "rationality" good-bye. — Harry G. Frankfurt

Of course, I strongly sympathized with Habermas and the philosophers representing the Frankfurt school, but I also saw the lack of conceptual clarity, and perceived the not-so-revolutionary self-importance in the epigones of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas. — Thomas Metzinger

What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made. This points to a similar and fundamental aspect of the essential nature of bullshit: although it is produced without concern with the truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong. — Harry G. Frankfurt

As a philosopher, I'm not obliged to explore every unknown wilderness. — Harry Frankfurt