Quotes from Carl E. Schorske

wir konnen warten. wissen macht frei [we can wait. knowledge liberates]. in these confident words the stalwart Ritter von Schmerling expressed the rationalistic expectations of the political process at the beginning of the liberal era in 1861. at the end of that era, the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, scion of a cultivated middle-class family, offered a different formula for political success: politics is magic. he who knows how to summon the forces from the deep, him will they follow.

Dream is not so different from deed as many believe," he wrote. "All activity of men begins as dream and later becomes dream once more.

Now they must be directed toward an inner, psychological reality. "No one thought of looking for the promised land where it is, and yet it lies so nearby. There it is: inside ourselves!… The promised land is wherever we carry it!

Where law ignores instinct, instinct rebels and subverts order.

It is too late for a politics based on law alone, too soon for a politics of grace which sublimates instinct.

Hofmannsthal once observed that the activity of modern poets "stands under the decree of necessity, as though they were all building on a pyramid, the monstrous residence of a dead king or an unborn god.

Where he makes a jest, a problem lies concealed.

In The Interpretation of Dreams, published two years before his jocular announcement, Freud had laid down his first principle of understanding the problems of dreams: "A dream is the fulfillment of a wish.

History," Burckhardt once observed, "is what one age finds worthy of note in another.