Thomas Mann

“Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.”

“For the beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.”

“I never can understand how anyone can not smoke - it deprives a man of the best part of life. With a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him, literally.”

“But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the fair-haired and the blue-eyed, the bright children of life, the happy, the charming and the ordinary.”

“Culture and possessions, there is the bourgeoisie for you.”

“What a wonderful phenomenon it is, carefully considered, when the human eye, that jewel of organic structures, concentrates its moist brilliance on another human creature!”

“A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.”

“It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as...”

“War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.”

“An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it c...”

“Psycho-analyses, how disgusting.”

“The Freudian theory is one of the most important foundation stones for an edifice to be built by future generations, the dwelling of a freer and wiser humanity.”

“For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.”

“There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.”

“What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.”

“A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.”

“A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.”

“Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.”

“Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.”

“Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.”