Klemperer Quotes & Sayings

I think that's so strange, because they do know that we're all actors and we perform things that have not necessarily anything to do with us personally. — Werner Klemperer

I am not a dictator, I have only simplified democracy. — Victor Klemperer

You know, I find it so difficult being a ... as a matter of fact, little do people know that most of the leading members of the cast have a background that they would never expect them to have, and play the show they did. — Werner Klemperer

They have over-cultivated national rhetoric [ ... ] they will have to undertake something. — Victor Klemperer

I'm very surprised at that, yes, because there were many chances for it to be in Germany once the syndication market started and it continually just did not happen. — Werner Klemperer

Does one unceasingly talk about a thousand years and enemies destroyed, if one is certain of these thousand years and this annihilation? — Victor Klemperer

We hear a lot about Palestine now; it does not appeal to us. Anyone who goes there exchanges nationalism and narrowness for nationalism and narrowness. — Victor Klemperer

The fact that I have such a problem that people ... that that has to, you know, be on people's mind, what my personal background is. To me, to be very frank with you, is a totally irrelevant thing. — Werner Klemperer

Historical context apart, Klemperer's journals can be read for their own sake as a gnawing meditation on the disappointments of life and the irrevocability of choices. He is intensely aware at all moments, perhaps because of his consciousness of being a "survivor," that death is only a breath away. He is one of the great kvetches of all time, endlessly recording aches and pains, bad dreams, shortages of food and medicine, snubs and humiliations. And, like everyone else, he wants everything both ways. In — Christopher Hitchens

To me the Zionists, who want to go back to the Jewish state of A.D. 70 (destruction of Jerusalem by Titus) are just as offensive as the Nazis. With their nosing after blood, their ancient "cultural roots," their partly canting, partly obtuse winding back of the world they are altogether a match for the National Socialists. That is the fantastic thing about the National Socialists, that they simultaneously share in a community of ideas with Soviet Russia and with Zion. — Victor Klemperer

Too many economists excuse their practical failure by saying "the politicians (or bureaucrats) didn't do exactly what I recommended." Just as medical practitioners must allow for the fact that their patients may not take all the pills they prescribe, or follow all the advice they are given, so economics practitioners need to foresee political and administrative pressures and make their plans robust to changes that politicians, bureaucrats, and lobbyists are likely to impose. — Paul Klemperer

In the war I was subject to military law, but subject to law nevertheless; now I am at the mercy of an arbitrary power. — Victor Klemperer

Klemperer's insight that Nazi speech dealt in superlatives. Hence, Hitler was the "smartest" leader of the "bravest" people of the "purest" blood, and Germany was the "greatest country" and "most glorious" of nations in the most "heroic" of wars and struggles against the "worst" of enemies in the "most dangerous" of times. — Dean G. Stroud

National Socialism adapts Fascism, Bolshevism, Americanism, works it all into Teutonic Romanticism. — Victor Klemperer

When you mean a show like this, you have to say to me a show exactly like this, the way it was done. — Werner Klemperer

I only have the quite childish horror of the grave and of nothingness — Victor Klemperer

But when they offered this little situation for me to do this voice in this special segment, I found it so incredibly humorous that I said yes, and I enjoyed it. It was fun. — Werner Klemperer

Academics love the semicolon; their hankering after logic demands a division which is more emphatic than a comma, but not quite as absolute a demarcation as a full stop. — Victor Klemperer

Klemperer detected a certain "hysteria of language" in the new flood of decrees, alarms, and intimidation - "This perpetual threatening with the death penalty!" - and in strange, inexplicable episodes of paranoid excess, like the recent nationwide search. In all this Klemperer saw a deliberate effort to generate a kind of daily suspense, "copied from American cinema and thrillers," that helped keep people in line. He also gauged it to be a manifestation of insecurity among those in power. In — Erik Larson

Newspapers are read differently now [ ... ] Between the lines. — Victor Klemperer

Victor Klemperer, a literary scholar of Jewish origin, turned his philological training against Nazi propaganda. He noticed how Hitler's language rejected legitimate opposition: The people always meant some people and not others (the president uses the word in this way), encounters were always struggles (the president says winning), and any attempt by free people to understand the world in a different way was defamation of the leader (or, as the president puts it, libel). Politicians — Timothy Snyder

Socialism has now become completely or almost completely identical with Bolshevism; that — Victor Klemperer