Reichstag Quotes & Sayings

The only one who really knows about the Reichstag is I, because I set it on fire! — Hermann Goring

I'm sure that Nero didn't set fire to Rome. It was the Christian-Bolsheviks who did that, just as the Commune set fire to Paris in 1871 and the Communists set fire to the Reichstag in 1932. — Adolf Hitler

If there's another 9/11 or a major war in the Middle-East involving a U.S. attack on Iran, I have no doubt that there will be, the day after or within days an equivalent of a Reichstag fire decree that will involve massive detentions in this country. — Daniel Ellsberg

We never work on only one project because we never know if we will get permission for a project. So, for 'Over the River,' we started in 1992. I was just finishing 'The Umbrellas' in Japan and California, and I was also working on getting permission to wrap the Reichstag. — Christo

It was also my idea that the advisory committees of the Academy should replace the legal committees of the German Reichstag, which was gradually fading into the background in the Reich. — Hans Frank

For tyrants, the lesson of the Reichstag fire is that one moment of shock enables an eternity of submission. For us, the lesson is that our natural fear and grief must not enable the destruction of our institutions. — Timothy Snyder

Just as Hitler used the Reichstag burning, the U.S. government now uses the so-called two wars, the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism, to fuel fear in the population and establish a police security state. — Ralph Metzner

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

Now, to describe the process of the Wrapped Reichstag, which went from 1971 to '95, there is an entire book about that, because each one of our projects has its own book. The book is not an art book, meaning it's not written by an art historian. — Christo

In 1930 I became a member of the Reichstag. — Hans Frank

World War II ended in a battle for a single buildng, Germany's Reichstag ... 7,000 German troops defending the building ... Nearly 5,000 men died in a battle for the building. — Andrei Cherny

Your soldiers instead of fleeing frantically, as they did in France and Poland, were shooting at us from their positions. For the sake of historical truth, I must verify that only the Greeks, of all the adversaries who confronted us, fought with bold courage and highest disregard of death." - Adolph Hitler, from a speech he delivered to Reichstag on May 4, 1941. — Konstantinos Koskoletos

After the First World War, Germany was trying to build a democracy. Then when the Reichstag, the legislature, was burned down in 1933, this was seen as such an emergency that human rights had to be suspended. The attack on the World Trade Towers has allowed Bush and his gang to do anything. What are we to do now? I say when there's a code red, we should all run around like chickens with our heads cut off. I don't feel that we are in any great danger. — Kurt Vonnegut

Germany no longer feels bound by the Locarno Treaty. In the interest of the primitive rights of its people to the security of their frontier and the safeguarding of their defence, the German Government has re-established, as from today, the absolute and unrestricted sovereignty of the Reich in the demilitarized zone!" Now the six hundred deputies, personal appointees all of Hitler, little men with big bodies and bulging necks and cropped hair and pouched bellies and brown uniforms and heavy boots, little men of clay in his fine hands, leap to their feet like automatons, their right arms upstretched in the Nazi salute, and scream Heils, the first two or three wildly, the next twenty-five in unison, like a college yell. Hitler raises his hand for silence. It comes slowly. Slowly the automatons sit down. Hitler now has them in his claws. He appears to sense it. He says in a deep, resonant voice: "Men of the German Reichstag!" The silence is utter. — William L. Shirer

On May 17, 1933, before the Reichstag, Hitler delivered his "Peace Speech," one of the greatest of his career, a masterpiece of deceptive propaganda that deeply moved the German people and unified them behind him and which made a profound and favorable impression on the outside world. — William L. Shirer

Told the Reichstag that the age of "Cabinet" wars, that is wars determined by rulers for limited ends, was over: "All we have now is people's war, and any prudent government will hesitate to bring about a war of this nature, with all its incalculable consequences." The great powers, he went on, will find it difficult to bring such wars to an end or admit defeat: "Gentlemen, it may be a war of seven years' or of thirty years' duration - and woe to him who sets Europe alight, who puts the first fuse to the powder keg!"89 — Margaret MacMillan

The authoritarians of today are also terror managers, and if anything they are rather more creative. Consider the current Russian regime, so admired by the president. Vladimir Putin not only came to power in an incident that strikingly resembled the Reichstag fire, he then used a series of terror attacks - real, questionable, and fake - to remove obstacles to total power in Russia and to assault democratic neighbors. — Timothy Snyder

The Patriot Act followed 9-11 as smoothly as the suspension of the Weimar constitution after the Reichstag Fire Decree. — Srda Trifkovic