Quotes About Germans

Because so many Germans came into contact with America and Americans, Germany provided the most productive and widely read authors in Europe dealing with the New World.

True faith and good education distinguish Germans from white Americans, who come across in May's novels as blasphemous and utterly uneducated. Indeed, it is Old Shatterhand's "Europeanness"—meaning his Germanness in a cultural sense, and not his whiteness in any kind of purely racial category—that constitutes his intellectual and spiritual-religious superiority, distinguishing him not only from the Indians, but also Anglo-Americans:

The lack of understanding by the Germans, but not only the Germans, for Anglo-Saxon traditions and American reality is an old story. —Hannah Arendt

A popular aphorism soon circulated among frontline troops: "Never were so few commanded by so many from so far." Asked why the Germans failed to bomb AFHQ headquarters, a cynical American major replied, "Because it's worth fifty divisions to them.

Derrien had issued his battle cry, he annulled it by order of Vichy. "November 8, we fight everybody," he wrote privately. "November 9, we fight the Germans. November 10, we fight nobody. November 10 (noon), we fight the Germans. November 11 (night), we fight nobody." Perhaps no passage written during the war better captured the agony of France and the moral gyrations to which her sons were subject.

When the V2s had first started landing in September, the authorities had put out a story that the huge blasts were caused by exploding gas mains. Nobody believed it. ('Have you heard about the Germans' new secret weapon – the flying gas main?')

It is simply impossible to expect the peoples of Britain and France to take up arms to deny the right of self-determination to ethnic Germans who are trapped in a foreign country they wish to leave.

The others had been driven into the desert to die of thirst (the Germans poisoned the waterholes), were shot, or—to economize on bullets—bayoneted or clubbed to death with rifle stocks.

It's quite a famous story that takes place on Christmas Eve, and the Germans, French, and Scottish are trying to make peace one night and they bury their dead and they play football. I play a German opera singer, in German, which I never have so I am really excited about that.

For the Rothschilds of Château Lafite-Rothschild in Bordeaux, it meant fleeing the country before the Germans took over their property.

Hispanics have a long tradition of defiance against authority. Come to that, the Irish and Italians and Jews also have a long tradition of defiance against authority. Thinking it over, everybody has a long tradition of defiance against authority. (Except the Germans, of course.)

The reference to the Lusitania was obvious enough," he recalled later, "but personally it never entered my mind for a moment that the Germans would actually perpetrate an attack upon her. The culpability of such an act seemed too blatant and raw for an intelligent people to take upon themselves.

Messersmith, in a dispatch, observed that even smart, well-traveled Germans will "sit and calmly tell you the most extraordinary fairy tales.

The one firm rock on which everyone was willing to build for the last two years was the French army," wrote Foreign Secretary Halifax in his diary, "and the Germans walked through it like they did through the Poles.

THAT DAY, AS A herald of the invasion that seemed soon to come, the Germans seized and occupied Guernsey, a British dependency in the Channel Islands off the coast of Normandy, less than two hundred air miles from Chequers. It was a minor action—the Germans held the island with only 469 soldiers—but troubling all the same.

most of the French retreated into pursuit of their immediate material interests, hating the Occupation of course, but doing next to nothing to hasten its end. This was precisely what the Germans needed.

You can say what you want about the Germans being full of "kunst", but what they are really full of is delicatessen.

The original reason to start the project, which was that the Germans were a danger, started me off on a process of action, which was to try to develop this first system at Princeton and then at Los Alamos, to try to make the bomb work.

According to the Himmler–Thierack agreements in 1942, the justice system was in the future mainly for Germans only.150 Their agreements went a long way in recognizing the validity of 'police justice'. Execution orders for Poles, usually carried out as soon as possible and beyond appeal, were formulated in such a way as to make clear that the decision was made by the police, not the courts.

Despite arguments between Easterners, who wanted an offensive anywhere but France, and Westerners, who believed that an offensive anywhere else was a waste of effort, it was generally accepted that the Germans could only be decisively defeated on the Western Front, not least because that was where most of them were.

Reacher nodded. He had dealt with German cops before. Both military and civilian. Not always easy. Mostly due to different perceptions. Germans thought they had been given a country, and Americans thought they had bought a large military base with servants. There

Before we pass judgment on the Germans let me say that I have never found an American who has expressed personal guilt over the fact that we destroyed a people and their civilization in brutal indifference to gain the North American continent.

The motor behind Hitler was not men's immorality or amorality; it was the Germans' obedience to morality—as defined by their nation's leading moral philosopher.

Remember the Hottentots? asked James. They've become the Khoi now, which means that the Germans will have to retire that wonderful word of theirs, Hottentotenpotentatenstantenattentater, which means, as you know, one who attacks the aunt of a Hottentot potentate.