Prussian Quotes - page 2
[The war is] a succession of miracles! The old Prussian spirit of Frd. Rex, of Clausewitz, Blücher, York, Gneisenau etc. has again manifested itself, as in 1870-71...The brilliant leading Generals in this war came from My school, they fought under my command in the [First] World War as lieutenants, captains or young majors. Educated by Schlieffen they put the plans he had worked out under me into practice along the same lines as we did in 1914.
Wilhelm II of Germany
It obliges one to think with a particular kind of logic and severity. If it is nonsense, it will not go into Latin...I regard it as cruelty to the young to deprive them of that insight into language...Who would have thought Thatcher would be responsible for introducing the Prussian system, of dictating from central government the content of education in the supposed interest of the state? Translation into Latin was the great stamp and mark of English classical scholarship...My fatal decision was not to be pedantic and leave it in Latin. I had written Et Tiberim multo spumantem sanguine cerno: from Virgil in the Aeneid.
Enoch Powell
It is no doubt true that you cannot "draw an indictment against a whole people". Yet the story of Prussian policy through many generations is dark indeed. "Prussia's whole policy", declared Metternich, "consisted in the enlargement of her territory and the extension of her influence; to attain it, she was willing to adopt any manner of means and pass over the law of nations and the universal principles of morality." What Frederick the Great began was followed by his successors at the end of the century, and continued by Bismarck. It inspired the Kaiser and his advisers in 1914. It was soon to be surpassed in cynicism and crime by Hitler.
Harold Macmillan
The Prussian Junker is the road hog of Europe. Small nationalities in his way hurled to the roadside, bleeding and broken; women and children crushed under the wheels of his cruel car; Britain ordered out of his road. All I can say is this. If the old British spirit is alive in British hearts that bully will be torn from his seat. Were he to win it would be the greatest catastrophe that befell democracy since the days of the Holy Alliance and its ascendancy. They think we cannot beat them. It will not be easy. It will be a long job. It will be a terrible war. But in the end we shall march through terror to triumph.
David Lloyd George
The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.
Henry A. Wallace
We were determined, at any rate, that this Treaty should not be a scrap of paper. What are the guarantees? The first is the disarmament of Germany. The German Army was the foundation and corner stone of Prussian policy. You had to scatter it, disperse it, disarm it-to make it impossible for it to come together again, to make it impossible to equip such an army. ... Those who have read the Treaty know the steps we have taken to make it impossible for Germany to have great factories and arsenals which at any moment she could turn on for the equipment of a great force. ... We, therefore, regard the disarmament of Germany-the reduction of her army, the destruction of her arsenals, the taking away of her guns-as one of the foremost guarantees for peace which you could exact in the Treaty.
David Lloyd George
As to the Navy, we must keep ahead of the German Navy... If our Fleet was not superior to the German Fleet, our very independence would depend on Germany's goodwill; and even granting that people like Jagow would not take advantage of such a situation, there must be others who would take advantage of it, or be compelled by public opinion in Germany to do so. The Prussian mentality is such that to be on really good terms with it one must be able to deal with it as an equal.
Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon
The fault with Hegel lies much deeper than in his glorification of the Prussian monarchy. He is guilty not so much of being servile as of betraying his highest philosophical ideas. His political doctrine surrenders society to nature, freedom to necessity, reason to caprice. And in so doing, it mirrors the destiny of the social order that falls, while in pursuit of its freedom, into a state of nature far below reason.
Herbert Marcuse
Positive philosophy made its counter-attack against critical rationalism on two fronts. Comte fought against the French form of negative philosophy, against the heritage of Descartes and the Enlightenment. In Germany, the struggle was directed against Hegel's system. Schelling received an express commission from Frederick William IV ‘to destroy the dragon seed' of Hegelianism, while Stahl, another anti-Hegelian, became the philosophical spokesman of the Prussian monarchy in 1840.
Herbert Marcuse
Since the war began, miles of paper and oceans of ink have been used to prove the barbarity, the cruelty, the oppression of Prussian militarism. Conservatives and radicals alike are giving their support to the Allies for no other reason than to help crush that militarism, in the presence of which, they say, there can be no peace or progress in Europe. But though America grows fat on the manufacture of munitions and war loans to the Allies to help crush Prussians the same cry is now being raised in America which, if carried into national action, would build up an American militarism far more terrible than German or Prussian militarism could ever be, and that because nowhere in the world has capitalism become so brazen in its greed and nowhere is the state so ready to kneel at the feet of capital.
Emma Goldman
