"I don't think anyone is thinking long-term now."

"Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols."

"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 society and the individual are mutually exclusive."

 

"It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death."

 

"Speech is civilisation itself."

"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 creates."

"Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form."

"Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated."


Thomas Mann