Quotes from Lion Feuchtwanger

I am a heretic in this matter just as the philosopher Plato was and as Saint-Exupéry, the aviator, is. Plato places courage in the lowest order among the virtues.

Physical courage is a fairly common trait in human beings. The other war and this one even more so have shown that there is a far greater quantum of physical courage in the world than has usually been supposed.

In a great little book that he had the moral courage to publish during the First World War, Sigmund Freud traces physical heroism back to the fact that every man of intelligence knows that he must some day die, but that no man, in his innermost soul, ever believes in his own death.

Though physical courage is a common phenomenon in our day and age, moral courage is a thing that is correspondingly rare.

People who have manifested the greatest physical courage, in actual fact, not seldom fail when it comes to showing a little moral courage.

I cannot keep my mouth shut, even when it is dangerous to have it open. If, for example, I hear somebody, even an important and easily irascible Somebody, say that Montaigne was born around the year 1600, I simply have to open my mouth and declare: "You are mistaken, sir, Montaigne was born in the year 1533.

Call the mania intellectual integrity, call it impertinence if you will. In any event that impertinence, that intellectual integrity, is one of my most conspicuous traits and one that differentiates me from the majority of my contemporaries.

It may be that I have sought to cultivate that trait in myself to such a high degree because I think of myself primarily as a writer. The chief satisfaction in the whole business of writing, it seems to me, comes down to saying what is, or what you think is.

Da sagten die Doktoren: »Wie es heißt von Moses, unserem Lehrer: ›Und niemand hat sein Grab erkundet bis auf diesen heutigen Tag.‹« Und alle erkannten, daß dem Josef als Denkmal sein Werk bestimmt war und kein anderes.

What is the use of being a writer of some note if one cannot treat oneself to such a luxury?

It is no less astonishing how many subjects—historical, philological, biological, sociological, economic—people regard as politics

The pushing, the scrambling, the hustle and bustle apart from which politics is inconceivable, utterly disgust me. My delight is contemplation and delineation.

As a writer I happen to be interested in the interrelations between two domains of intellectual activity, between two sciences, if you prefer; the interrelations between history and philology, to be specific.

So then, one thing was certain. Marseille was actually getting ready to make up a train for us....

After all, they said, the French Fascists now in power had identical interests with the Germans. Les loups ne se mangent pas entre eux—wolf does not eat wolf. Hitler's government and Laval's government were playing into each other's hands.

Our wives, German women or French women as they may have been, stood loyally by us and wisely, cool-headedly, did what they could to help us all.

A few pages in Mein Kampf are indeed worth reading, the pages, I mean, that relate to the orator and to the difference between the orator and the writer.

The passages on the orator and on propaganda were written by an expert. They are worth reading and will always be. They spring from the innermost being of a man born to nothing but to sway masses of men, and in spite of themselves emphasize the risks that a man runs in listening to a good speaker without taking the necessary precautions.

What a useless life I had led. Often enough in hours of normal health I had debated the value of writing books. What did one accomplish by writing, what influence did one exert, what improvements did one effect?

The Nihilist intelligentzia had sustained the thesis that writing was merely a pastime like any other, an empty amusement of the writer like sports or liquor or whoring or what you will. I had never accepted that view.

while America, for its part, proved singularly unreceptive to the socialist-realist principle that undergirds them all: the principle that art can, or even must, have a message; and that such art-with-a-message, which will always be dismissed as propaganda, is in fact the only available corrective to the real and actual propaganda of entrenched official power.

Anger at the senselessness of my situation, at the stupidity of French bureaucracy, filled me to the very pores. My intelligence failed to offer the argument that I was dealing not with individual men but with a system.

I thought of my Levantine later on when the Vichy government proclaimed laws against Jews that were modelled on those of Nürnberg.

The fact is we all "went flat," we were deadened. Discomforts and indignities, our own or others', that would have enraged us a short time before we now accepted resignedly with a shrug of the shoulders.