Max Amsterdam Quotes & Sayings

It was not always the case, of course, that navies paid for themselves. In wartime, costs often exceeded revenues, and those deficits grew over time as fleets and armies got bigger. But this was hardly an insurmountable obstacle for the most dynamic economies in the world. The United Provinces and England were able to borrow all they needed to underwrite their defense budgets. The pressures of war gave a powerful impetus to the growth of stocks, bonds, loans, and paper currencies during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and helped to turn Amsterdam and then London into international financial centers. To take one example, the Bank of England was established in 1694 to raise funds to allow England to wage war against France. — Max Boot

Often, very often, I am alone. My studio in Amsterdam, (Beckmann lived in the center of Amsterdam during World War 2.) an enormous old tobacco storeroom is again filled in my imagination with figures from the old days and from the new, like an ocean moved by storm and sun and always present in my thoughts. Then shapes become beings and seem comprehensible to me in the great void and uncertainty of the space which I call god. — Max Beckmann

I am working here (in Amsterdam) on my last big triptych, which will be a tremendous story, and which gives me a more intense life and exhilaration. My God, life is worth living! — Max Beckmann