So then learn to conquer your fear. This is the only art we have to master nowadays: to look at things without fear, and to fearlessly do right.
Friedrich Durrenmatt
The difference between humans and wild animals is that humans pray before they commit murder.
Emotions have no place in business, unless you do business with them.
The world is bad but not without hope. It is only hopeless when you look at it from an ideal viewpoint.
Man is imperfect. The reality he creates is always endangered by man.
Human life is beyond comprehension.
A state always calls itself fatherland when it is ready for murder.
The savages don't have atom bombs.
The rightful claim to dissent is an existential right of the individual.
Pretend to be dumb, that's the only way to reach old age.
Before anything else, we need a new age of Enlightenment. Our present political systems must relinquish their claims on truth, justice and freedom and have to replace them with the search for truth, justice, freedom and reason.
We do not consider patriotism desirable if it contradicts civilized behavior.
Only the freedom of mind can prevent the state from becoming totalitarian and from issuing totalitarian demands.
Religion and political expediency go beautifully hand in hand.
The problems of all of humanity can only be solved by all of humanity.
Whoever is content with the world, and who profits from its lack of justice, does not want to change it.
Everything in the world can be changed, my dear Florestan, but the human being.
Nothing that has been thought can ever be taken back.
In a society which is structured the wrong way, piety has no effect.
The only remedy against hunger is reasonable birth control.
The freedom of each individual can only be the freedom of all.
Someone who is about to die does not mourn the dead.
There are risks which are not acceptable: the destruction of humanity is one of them.
Communism is a proposition to structure the world more reasonably, a proposition for changing the world. As such, we have to analyze it and, if we deem it reasonable, act upon it.
Truth is always a delusion.
News reports don't change the world. Only facts change it, and those have already happened when we get the news.
Power is paradoxical.
It is inhuman to continue a war which could easily be ended.
For people who have no critical acumen, a state is a mythical entity, for those who think critically it is a rational fiction, created by man in order to facilitate human coexistence.
A story is not finished, until it took the worst turn.
For a person who is dying only eternity counts.
There are thoughts we must not think.
Justice is horrible.
World history is tragic.
Today's Communism can survive only if it abandons the myth of an infallible party, if it continues to think, and if it becomes democratic.
Above all, be suspicious of your fatherland. Nobody is more inclined to become a murderer than a fatherland.
One does not set fire to a world which is already lost.
The worst possible turn can not be programmed. It is caused by coincidence.
Today's difference between Russia and the United States is that in Russia everybody takes everybody else for a spy, and in the United States everybody takes everybody else for a criminal.
When death has you by the throat, you don't mince words.
Our science has become terrible, our research dangerous, our findings deadly. We physicists have to make peace with reality. Reality is not as strong as we are. We will ruin reality.
A major power can afford a military debacle only when it looks like a political victory.
A story has been thought through to the end when it has taken the worst possible turn.
The art of the cuisine, when fully mastered, is the one human capability of which only good things can be said.
Revolutions demand enormous sacrifices and, at the same time, create a new need to change the world again.
It is surely easier to confess a murder over a cup of coffee than in front of a jury.
We are the world.
Who sows fear, reaps weapons.
You can't take back an act you were able to think.
It is easy to kill when you don't see your victim.
