Berlin Quotes

I think it’s absolutely fascinating that in Berlin the parliament can discuss actively the role of their soldiers in Afghanistan because is it still possible, literally, for a German soldier to take up arms.

All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin. And therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner!’

You can’t stop demographics. And show me a fence that ever worked. It didn’t work at Hadrian’s Wall. The Great Wall of China didn’t work. The Berlin Wall.

I love Berlin.

I think the political class in Berlin doesn’t need to be supervised and monitored by intelligence services in order to find out what they’re thinking. Just go to lunch with them, go to dinner with them, or read the papers.

As a composer, Dylan now fits comfortably alongside George Gershwin or Irving Berlin, though he grumpily refuses to wear any man’s collar.

Every Westerner is jubilating that the Berlin Wall has fallen. Something worst than the Berlin Wall is in Palestine; and nobody is talking about it.

Soho House is normally a private-members club, but the Berlin one has a hotel open to the public. Many beautiful rooms in a cool location, and who knows who you’ll run into in the lobby!

The Berlin of the ’20s formed the foundation of my future education… the Berlin of the UFA studios, of Fritz Lang, Lubitsch and Erich Pommer. The Berlin of the architects Gropius, Mendelsohn and Mies van der Rohe. The Berlin of the painters Max Libermann, Grosz, Otto Dix, Klee and Kandinsky.

With the Berlin I was able to set up a fortress that he could come near but not breach.

Berlin is still going through a transition since the Cold War – both in what used to be East and West Berlin. I can still sense the confusion and the struggle for identity there in the streets. There’s a pulse to it.

The best thing about Berlin was that I got to be surrounded by people who pursue their ideas for themselves.

Berlin is all about volatility. Its identity is based not on stability but on change.

I like museums in Berlin a lot, especially in the eastern part. They’re extraordinarily good.

I knew Berlin would have to become a kind of character in my new book, ‘In the Garden of Beasts’. I had felt likewise about Chicago when I wrote ‘The Devil in the White City’ and Galveston with ‘Isaac’s Storm’.

There is something about the name Berlin that evokes an image of men in hats and long coats standing under streetlamps on rainy nights.

Taking trains and trams in Berlin, I noticed people reading. Books, I mean – not pocket-size devices that bleep as if censorious, on which even Shakespeare scans like a spreadsheet.

The particular feature of Berlin – well, all you need to do is look at the map: the geographical position of the city right in the heart of Europe, and the separation of the most powerful two blocs we’ve ever had in history, which went all the way through Germany.

I was born in Berlin, and when I was 6, my mom passed. When I was 9, I moved to near Washington, D.C., where I lived with my aunt and uncle. And then at 11, I moved back to Berlin. And then at 16, I got in trouble in school and moved back to the Washington area.

Certainly my parents were very political, so the whole Berlin Wall thing – and being a kid of the ’80s – that’s just something that’s in your experience.

When you think of the Cold War, there are various places where you imagine espionage. Espionage crossroads of the Cold War bring you to the backstreets of Berlin, or Vienna.

The Berlin Wall fell because the East Germans saw the West had more. The Koreans don’t like the Japanese and try to prove to them that they are worth more in the industrial arena.

On the little money I had collected I lived in Berlin very cheaply, ate very cheaply. And already in 1920 I saved the first salaries I received to go to Munich.

He was very concerned about his children potentially being kidnapped or attached, and that’s why they were covered up. When he went to Berlin zoo, there were 200 photographers.

I can understand the Chinese Wall: it was built as a defense against marauders. But a wall such as that in Berlin, built to prevent people from seeking freedom, is almost beyond comprehension.

I’ve seen things change and people forget: the history of Berlin, the history of queer struggle, the history of AIDS, the history of New York changing from an artistic powerhouse to more of a financial one now.

Berlin is well on its way to becoming one of the most vibrant startup hubs in the world.

As a five-year-old in Berlin in 1965, I didn’t know that funny women existed. It wasn’t until I got back to England that I realised women could be funny.

If New York is a wise guy, Paris a coquette, Rome a gigolo and Berlin a wicked uncle, then London is an old lady who mutters and has the second sight. She is slightly deaf, and doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

‘Orphee’ is, for me, about changes: about moving to a new city, leaving behind an old life in Copenhagen, and building a new one in Berlin – about the death of old relationships and the birth of new ones.

It is Leistikow’s lasting achievement – and will always remain so – that he found a style that can express the melancholy charm of the surroundings of Berlin. We see the Grunewald lakes and those on the upper Spree through his eyes; he has taught us to see their beauty.

People of Berlin – people of the world – this is our moment. This is our time.

Remember, the early ’60s in London was something – which must have been like Berlin in the ’30s when the arts flourished. You didn’t have the differences in class, and so on.

Our films are changing so people across the world can see them – when ‘Highway’ premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, a Polish lady said to me, ‘It has a strong message for women.’ So it’s good to know our films are connecting universally.

I know when the Berlin wall went down and I walked into what was East Berlin and saw two big Nike banners – that gave me a chill.

We feel very honored to have been offered the responsibility to host this great event, Berlin is a wonderful city that is developing at a tremendous rate, and this decision means that we can now prepare to welcome the world’s best athletes to a fascinating place.

In Berlin I especially enjoyed the orchestral concerts, and I attended a large number of them. I formed the acquaintance of a good many musicians, several of whom spoke of my playing in high terms.

When I was a kid, while touring East Berlin – back when there was an East Berlin – I got my left foot stuck in an escalator in Alexanderplatz. A few hours later, thanks to blowtorches and chainsaws and East German soldiers and the U.S. Embassy, my foot was released, and I along with it.

Like most manic depressives, some of my symptoms included racing thoughts that I simply had to act upon – flying from New York to Paris and taking the train to Berlin; flying to Argentina in the middle of the night; spending tens of thousands of dollars on unnecessary garments, dinners and gifts.

I think the political class in Berlin doesn’t need to be supervised and monitored by intelligence services in order to find out what they’re thinking. Just go to lunch with them, go to dinner with them, or read the papers.

We now fly with an airbus, which has 210 seats, six times the week to Palma to the spider of the air Berlin.

I love swing, jazz, blues, standards. I love the American songbook, Gershwin, Berlin. It’s all that. So I’m born in the wrong era and I just don’t fit into the 21st century at all.

Well, they didn’t lack for topics after Hiroshima. Why should 9/11 slow them down? I know it got a lot of press, but it’s just a few large buildings and aircraft, it’s not like D-Day and the Seige of Berlin.

An hour of violin lessons in Berlin is an hour where you get the child interested in music. An hour in a violin lesson in Palestine is an hour away from violence, is an hour away from fundamentalism.

My father is German; my mother is African-American. Growing up, I visited my grandparents in Berlin a lot. I would not see any other person of color for three weeks. People would stare. They would say things like, ‘Oh, you look like chocolate – I want to eat you up!’

NATO was constructed on the – with the reason, whether one believes it or not, that it was going to defend Western Europe from Russian assault. Once the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union was beginning to collapse, that reason was gone. So, first question: why does NATO exist?

In Zurich, in a cafe overlooking the Limmat, I ate butter-drenched white asparagus pulled from the ground that morning; it had the aftertaste of champagne. I’ve been able to appreciate epic meals in San Francisco, New Orleans, Berlin, Paris, Las Vegas.

In Germany air became generally accepted Berlin in this area. It operated with 45 airplanes within the Low Cost range from Germany, and is one the most successful carriers in Europe.

Predicting has a spotty record in science fiction. I’ve had some failures. On the other hand, I also predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of fundamentalist Islam… and I’m not happy to be right in all of those cases.

You could grow up in Germany in the postwar years without ever meeting a Jewish person. There were small communities in Frankfurt or Berlin, but in a provincial town in south Germany, Jewish people didn’t exist.

I had first come to Berlin in 1990, on a search for someplace to live besides the United States.

I feel very fragile cycling in London, whereas in Berlin there are proper cycle paths everywhere.

I myself have already spent a third of my life in Germany, first in Cologne and then, since 1994, in Berlin.

The church of St. Peter at Berlin, notwithstanding the total difference between them in the style of building, appears in some respects to have a great resemblance to St. Paul’s in London.

Millions of Millennials and Gen Zers were never exposed to the threats of the Soviet Union; they did not live through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev; they do not remember the Mariel boatlift or the SALT treaties or the Cuban missile crisis.

I came to Berlin not to visit its museums and galleries, its operas, its theaters… but for the sake of seeing and speaking with the world’s greatest living man – Alexander von Humboldt.

‘Hum Dono’ was accepted in a very big way. It was the official entry at the 1962 Berlin Film Festival.

I did a concert… in September with the Berlin Philharmonic… They’re great musicians, and there’s always something to learn from them.

As far as songwriters, I’ve always been a fan of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and George Gershwin; those guys mean a lot to me.

Berlin is in a state of transition. There are lots of people who don’t stay here. They pass through. They might not ‘clean up,’ but they mature. It is a city where people spend a significant time in their lives, and then they move on.

Some people go to Berlin to get more cutting edge; I went and started wearing lederhosen and going to visit baroque palaces.

Notionally a left-wing movement, the Anti-Germans were born after the collapse of the Berlin wall. While most Germans rejoiced at the end of the Cold War, the Anti-Germans feared that a united Germany might lead to a fourth Reich – and a return of anti-Semitism.

I had first come to Berlin in 1990, on a search for someplace to live besides the United States.

Berlin is like being abroad in Germany. It’s German, but not provincial.

Berlin is still going through a transition since the Cold War – both in what used to be East and West Berlin. I can still sense the confusion and the struggle for identity there in the streets. There’s a pulse to it.

The Franco-German tandem at the core of post-war European integration has become lopsided. Relations between Berlin and Paris are unusually poor, with some French politicians decrying the ‘selfish intransigence’ in the euro crisis of Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel.

I made this Swedish movie called ‘Snabba Cash,’ or ‘Easy Money,’ and it was shown at the Berlin Film Festival. A lot of American studios, agents, and people like that saw it there and liked it.

And imagine where we’d be today if President Franklin Roosevelt had owned apartment buildings in Frankfurt and Berlin. You know, some of us might be speaking German.

In 2013, we opened our first international office in London and established a European hub in Berlin.

It would be wrong to say that the city of Berlin is not regulated. What I think is more interesting is to what extent a city creates a sort of safe haven for its users, so that people feel confident that the city works on their behalf.

I couldn’t have written things like ‘Low’ and ‘Heroes,’ those particular albums, if it hadn’t have been for Berlin and the kind of atmosphere I felt there.

When the Berlin Wall came down, my dad left to visit the U.S. He met my mom at this summer camp where they were both working, so I grew up between Washington Heights and Germany speaking two languages.

Dietz and Schwartz have sort of fallen by the wayside a little bit, and they are up there with Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin and Cole Porter. They are the finest of the revue composers – their stuff is so good and so strong.

Eventually, I gave up my sublet in Berlin and stayed in England for a long time – for about 20 years.

I knew from an online search that the Wisconsin State Historical Society, on the vast University of Wisconsin campus, held the papers of Sigrid Schultz, a spunky correspondent for the ‘Chicago Tribune’ who became one of Martha Dodd’s friends in Berlin.

I’ve been lucky to conduct the very best orchestras in the world: New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Berlin, the London Philharmonic.

It is our historical experience, that Hungary can only live in wealth and safety if Berlin, Moscow, and Ankara are on our side and also interested in our success – even if we do not always agree on certain questions.

I was a foreign correspondent in Berlin in the mid-’90s.

Berlin is my favourite city.

Musically, I didn’t relate to Berlin. There seemed to be a lot of machine music made there – I don’t think I saw a stringed instrument in two years.

I feel too young in 2018 to take over the Berlin Philharmonic as the successor to Simon Rattle.

To represent your country at a home Olympics is something special and I’m over the moon to be selected for Team GB. I was pleased to get the qualifying time in Berlin earlier this year and my sole focus is getting in the right shape for London.

In October, 1865, occurred what was, in my eyes, the greatest event in the history of the observatory. The new transit circle arrived from Berlin in its boxes.

The most interesting legal philosophy is German, so naturally I went to Germany, particularly to Berlin, quite a bit.

I studied German at school. I lived in Berlin for two years and had a German girlfriend for five years, so I don’t find speaking German particularly difficult. Singing was slightly more difficult.

Eight months after graduating from Ryerson, there I was in West Berlin working with Marlene Dietrich and David Bowie and Kim Novak.

I found a book facing out that I’d always meant to read: William Shirer’s ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.’ About a third of the way through, I suddenly, finally caught up to the fact that Shirer had been there in Berlin, from 1934 on, and was finally kicked out when the U.S. entered the war.

When the Berlin Wall came down the Americans cried, ‘Victory,’ and walked off the field.

Berlin has traditionally backed a rules-based eurozone in which every member state is responsible for its own finances, including bank bailouts, with political union limited to a fiscal overlord’s possessing veto power over national budgets that violate the rules.

I believe, if done correctly, eliminating Saddam and liberating Iraq could be the ‘Normandy Invasion’ or ‘fall of the Berlin Wall’ of our generation… the Iraqi people are eager to be rid of Saddam, and there is equally encouraging evidence that republican principles could thrive there.

When historians consider the significance of the Berlin crises of the mid-20th century, I do not believe that they will record it as an incident in the encirclement of freedom. The true view, in my judgment, will be to see it rather as a major episode in the recession of communism.

Brazil is a country that has rich people, as you have in New York City, as you have in Berlin or in London. But we also have poor people like in Bangladesh or in African suburbs.

Some of the occurrences leading up to and immediately following the Berlin World Championships have infringed not only my rights as an athlete but also my fundamental and human rights, including my rights to dignity and privacy.

I’ve never been anywhere in my life like it and I only really noticed it when I returned to Los Angeles and then Berlin. Everybody is much better off in these places, there is not poverty like in Cuba, but everybody complains about things.

When I played my first concert with an orchestra, I was eight years old in Berlin.

The extraordinary thing about Irving Berlin is that he’s like the American Mozart! It seems as if his songs were always there. How do you put together songs like ‘Always’ or ‘Cheek To Cheek’? Songs of his are, frankly, perfect.

The fall of the Berlin Wall is very much a sequel, a continuation of the story about Eastern Europe emerging from war and Communism. The notion of presenting history as a story also appealed to me very much, since that is the way I look at the events I cover as a reporter.

I have worshipped Berlin from the day I read ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ in South Africa. It seemed to make it respectable to be a liberal.

In ‘The Serpent’s Egg,’ I created a Berlin which no one recognized, not even I.

I was lucky because on the morning after the burning of the Reichstag I left my home very early to catch a train to Berlin for the conference of our student organization and that is the only reason why I escaped arrest.

My father is German; my mother is African-American. Growing up, I visited my grandparents in Berlin a lot. I would not see any other person of color for three weeks. People would stare. They would say things like, ‘Oh, you look like chocolate – I want to eat you up!’

But with the Berlin, I was able to allow him to get near, but not quite near enough, and I knew where to draw the line with the fortresses I had set up.

I found a correlation between the spreading of democracy after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise in slavery. Now, as countries, former Communist countries, became so-called democratic, people started to be enslaved by their own countrymen.

We feel very honored to have been offered the responsibility to host this great event, Berlin is a wonderful city that is developing at a tremendous rate, and this decision means that we can now prepare to welcome the world’s best athletes to a fascinating place.

I spent the afternoon of Sunday 9 July, 2006 in Berlin sleeping and playing the PlayStation. In the evening, I went out and won the World Cup.

Berlin would be a great place to have no cell phone, I think. Especially if you were able to live in a central location.

In August 1961, I visited President Kennedy at Hyannis Port. The Berlin Wall was going up, and he was about to begin a huge military buildup – reluctantly, or so he said, as he puffed on a cigar liberated by a friend from Castro’s Cuba.

I used to conduct the last opera in Berlin on Sunday, get on a plane on Monday to Chicago, and start a rehearsal that same night, if it was a performance week.

I have a whole box full of pieces of the Berlin Wall and a heart made from the barbed wire of the Iron Curtain. It’s – they’re cherished treasures to me now, of course.

I had only that one picture, Hitler, the Beast of Berlin, in which I had a part big enough to impress anyone. I tried for better roles over and over again.

I met Jared Leto at Soho House in Berlin.

There’s a great tradition among the English of writing about Berlin. It’s kind of a state of mind, almost. That even translates in terms of music. A lot of people go to Berlin with the idea that it’s a state of mind.

As far as songwriters, I’ve always been a fan of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and George Gershwin; those guys mean a lot to me.

Berlin is all about volatility. Its identity is based not on stability but on change.

It’s always the small people who change things. It’s never the politicians or the big guys. I mean, who pulled down the Berlin wall? It was all the people in the streets. The specialists didn’t have a clue the day before.

If you look at any film fest, the setting gives it colour. Be it Goa, Cannes or even Berlin in the winter, the setting makes these festivals special and gives it a definition.

If you’re trying to get to the underworld of Berlin, it’s not suits and ties; it’s rock and roll.

All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin. And therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner!’

I didn’t know what acting school was, so I went onto the computer and typed ‘acting school.’ I found one in Berlin, and I found ones in Vienna, Zurich, and London. I went to all of those places to audition. You were supposed to have two monologues, and I only had one.

I want to say at once that I frankly believe that Irving Berlin is the greatest songwriter that has ever lived…. His songs are exquisite cameos of perfection, and each one of them is as beautiful as its neighbor. Irving Berlin remains, I think, America’s Schubert.

My dad was a journalist. He was in Rwanda right after the genocide. In Berlin when the wall came down. He was always disappearing and coming back with amazing stories. So telling stories for a living made sense to me.

Even in November 1938, after five years of anti-Semitic legislation and persecution, they still owned, according to the Times correspondent in Berlin, something like a third of the real property in the Reich.

In the past Berlin was much more radical and extreme and now it’s becoming much more of a conventional European city.

I think that, certainly, most of my operatic roles are in German. I think it happened because, of course, I was lucky in that I was invited to sing, first of all, my operatic debut in Berlin at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, which was West Berlin at the time.

People of Berlin – people of the world – this is our moment. This is our time.

My father loved to take us on historical vacations, and you should have seen the stares we received in East Berlin.

More people die on a yearly basis crossing the Florida Straits than ever died trying to cross the Berlin Wall.

I’m old and boring in London and get really tired around midnight. But in Berlin, I had this new lease of life because there’s something electric about the place.

Look at what has occurred in history. When the Berlin Wall fell, it was not surprising, but it was unexpected. Who predicted the Arab Spring? Nobody expected it, but all the ingredients were there. I think all the ingredients are also there for Quebec to become a country. But when? That’s another question.

There are many people in the world who really don’t understand-or say they don’t-what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin!

The future is going to happen in Toronto or Berlin or Bengaluru and not necessarily in the Valley.

Fall of the Berlin wall? Being there was fun. Nations that flaked off of the Soviet Union in southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus? Being there was not so fun.

I was thinking of writers living in East Europe before the Berlin Wall came down. They wrote fantastic stuff but were dealing with a situation that was almost impossible to deal with, but they found a way.

You see Mexican cinema in festivals throughout the world, and you see Mexican directors getting recognized at Cannes, at the Oscars, in Berlin, but the question is, What is the end result of that in terms of the market? That’s where it’s lacking.

When I went in for ‘The Good Doctor,’ I had just been released from ‘Berlin Station.’ And when I got the initial role for the ‘Good Doctor’ pilot, her name was Allegra Abe. That was the script.

I live between Barcelona and Berlin. Staying in Spain over the winter and Berlin for spring and summer is an ideal combination.

I met Jared Leto at Soho House in Berlin.

My own kids were with me in Berlin when Germany was reunited, and they were with me in Moscow when the Soviet Union collapsed. We talked about these things at the dinner table, at their schools, with their friends.

I couldn’t really take a girl from Berlin to live in Leeds. I love it here. I miss the Yorkshire sense of humor and things like bitter and Yorkshire puddings, but I can still get my hands on salt ‘n’ vinegar crisps.

‘The New Black Yoga’ originally was born from a film that I had made prior called ‘Black Yoga.’ And I was living in Berlin at the time, dealing with a lot of anxiety and stress around the project that I was working on, which is not an abnormal thing for me.

I remember an article, I can’t recall who by, it was after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which said that now the Wall was down, there could be no more class war. Only someone with money could ever say such a thing.

The music changed. We had Irving Berlin and Gershwin and Lerner and Loewe and Cole Porter. Great music. Now we have ‘Rent.’

It is our historical experience, that Hungary can only live in wealth and safety if Berlin, Moscow, and Ankara are on our side and also interested in our success – even if we do not always agree on certain questions.

At some point he seemed to lose all confidence trying to break down the Berlin Wall. He was still fighting as only Kasparov can, but I could see it in his eyes that he knew he wasn’t going to win one of these games.

The Berlin Wall wasn’t the only barrier to fall after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Traditional barriers to the flow of money, trade, people and ideas also fell.

The world has fundamentally changed. It fundamentally changed when the Berlin Wall came down and the ‘evil empire’ ceased to exist. We are engaged around the world whether we like it or not.

I’ve been to several international film festivals, including those in Locarno, Switzerland; Dubai; Russia; Berlin; Cannes; Bangkok; and Hong Kong.

My grandfather had been a well-known judge in Berlin.

The fall of the Berlin Wall makes for nice pictures. But it all started in the shipyards.

I grew up in East Berlin, in a family of artists.

I want to say at once that I frankly believe that Irving Berlin is the greatest songwriter that has ever lived…. His songs are exquisite cameos of perfection, and each one of them is as beautiful as its neighbor. Irving Berlin remains, I think, America’s Schubert.

The crucial point is always the own cost structure. Therefore I created a Low Cost alliance with air Berlin.

I studied German at school. I lived in Berlin for two years and had a German girlfriend for five years, so I don’t find speaking German particularly difficult. Singing was slightly more difficult.

When the Berlin Wall came down the Americans cried, ‘Victory,’ and walked off the field.

When historians consider the significance of the Berlin crises of the mid-20th century, I do not believe that they will record it as an incident in the encirclement of freedom. The true view, in my judgment, will be to see it rather as a major episode in the recession of communism.

Irving Berlin was the greatest songwriter of all time. I was in awe of him. But his music wasn’t my music. My music was the blues.

I was always drawn to Broadway musicals, and obviously composers like Gershwin, Rodgers, Berlin and Porter were writing music that I found wildly impressive.

Kennedy was president for only 1,037 days, but during his short tenure, he achieved much. At the Cold War’s most dangerous hour, he preserved the peace. He improved relations with the Soviet Union and replaced tension over Berlin with a limited test ban treaty.

I find it a bit sad that there is no photo of me hanging on the walls in the Berlin Museum at Checkpoint Charlie.

The coolest party I’ve ever D.J.ed would have to be for the artist Damien Hirst. It was an amazing party in Berlin. I had such a great time, and people danced all night long.

I did a concert… in September with the Berlin Philharmonic… They’re great musicians, and there’s always something to learn from them.

As for the role of France and Germany: French politics is often more self-confident then German politics due to the catastrophe in the first half of the last century. If Berlin and Paris don’t agree, then it is difficult to make progress in Europe.

If I’d been living in Berlin in 1933-34, could I possibly have foreseen the Holocaust and all the corollary horrors of World War II? And if I had, would I have done anything about it? I also started to wonder: how does a culture slip its moorings?

I then remained in Berlin until Dec. 1938, spending my time between pictures at my villa on the Riviera.

I haven’t been to Berlin Fashion Week before, but it’s really on the up. Being an artist as well as a model, I know that the art world is booming here, so it makes sense that fashion would feel that effect, too.