His Parliaments On Fire and His Hands Are Up

“The man who does not wish to belong to the mass needs only to cease taking himself easily; let him follow his conscience, which calls to him: “Be your self! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself.””

“Without the daily press and without anonymity one always has the consolation that it is a definite individual person who voices the error, gives impudence expression, etc. In that case there’s hope that many will shrink from being that individual, and one knows in any case who he is. But the Somebody who is nobody (and therefore has no responsibility) can put any error into circulation without a thought of responsibility and with the help of the most dreadfully disproportioned communications medium, that is terrible. And that this irresponsible error should then be taken up by the public which is again nobody! There is no one anywhere, and that is why there is error everywhere.”

“The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily.”

“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest — forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.”