“God is with the vanquished, not with the victors! At a time when His Holiness, the infallible Pope of Christendom, is concluding a peace agreement, a Concordat, with the enemies of Christ, when the Protestant's are establishing a "German church" and censoring the Bible, we descendants of the old Jews, the forefathers of European culture, are the only legitimate German representatives of that culture. Thanks to inscrutable divine wisdom, we are physically incapable of betraying it to the heathen civilization of poison gases, to the ammonia-breathing, Germanic war god.”

“It's not difficult to sing in German; it's difficult to feel in German. This takes time. It's a culture.”

“Many of us served in the war, many died. We have written for Germany, we have died for Germany. We have spilled our blood for Germany in two ways: the blood that runs in our veins, and the blood with which we write. We have sung Germany, the real Germany! And that is why today we are being burned by Germany!”

“Never yet has such furious movement brought in its train such slowness in the passage of time. Everything is spinning, only time stands still. The rotation goes on forever. And when the wheel finally stops spinning, the riders in their relief forget that they have paid money to enjoy themselves, and only had the fright of their lives. They feel glad to have gotten out alive.”

“A moving shadow means more to us than a body at rest. We are no longer taken in by a fixed grin. We know that only death has a rictus.”

“In the early Middle Ages the dominant form of political organization in Western Europe was the Germanic kingdom, and the German kingdom was in some ways the complete antithesis of the modern state. (p. 13)”

“Above all there's a lack of personal discipline, manners, decorum, natural discretion. If everyone causes their own individual catastrophes, how can there fail to be more general catastrophes? After all, the passengers on a bus or streetcar make up a community of a kind. But they don't see it that way, not even in a moment of danger. As they see it they are bound always to be the other's enemy: for political, social, all sorts of reasons. Where so much hate has been bottled up, it is vented on inanimate things, and provokes the celebrated perversity of inanimate things. Sending experts into other countries won't help much, so long as each individual refuses to work out his own personal traffic plan. There is a wisdom in the accident of language by which there is a single word, "traffic," for movement in the streets, and for people's dealings with one another.”