Quotes of the day
Posted by | Posted in Uncategorized | Posted on 23-05-2005
This one is from a book I am reading about East Germany, Mary Fulbrook’s Anatomy of a Dictatorship (US, UK). It begins the section named “Coercion and Control: Stasi, Police and Military”:
- The GDR was a police state.
You’ve got to love sentences like that: brief and to the point. And I can’t help but think that her message with such a short, terse sentence is this: anybody out there who is trying to pretend that the GDR was not a police state, stop you’re messing around and come back to reality.
You must remember also that the book was published in 1995, only six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and while the Stasi files were really still being digested (as they still are today.)
This one is from the Salzburger Nachrichten as pointed out by Stefan at Politically Incorrect:
- In the face of this massive unemployment, not even a new war or a new flood could rescue Schroeder [in upcoming elections]. (Denn selbst ein neues Hochwasser oder ein neuer Krieg würden Schröder angesichts der Massenarbeitslosigkeit nicht mehr retten.)
Now here is a quote for the Wahnsinn! department, what we might call “Unbelievable!” in a negative sort of way in English. It comes from this Opinion Journal article, with a hat tip to Kosmoblog:
- North Rhine-Westphalia’s Social Democratic government has piled up debt in a vain attempt to save jobs in the dying coal and steel industries. In 1960 some 600,000 Germans worked in the coal mines; that number has declined by 94%, to 36,000. Each job in the industry costs the government a subsidy equivalent to some $90,000 a year.
I don’t care how socialistic you are: could you possibly be so stupid as to think that this kind of subsidy is something that could work? There ought to be a big time taxpayer revolution in the region. Maybe yesterday’s vote was a sign of that. Sadly, I doubt it. I don’t have much faith in the German people’s ability to conjure up a taxpayer revolution.
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