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The Great Gatsby
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Friedrich Durrenmatt Quotes

Nothing that has been thought can ever be taken back.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

Truth is always a delusion.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

It is inhuman to continue a war which could easily be ended.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

The world is bad but not without hope. It is only hopeless when you look at it from an ideal viewpoint.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

I am a man, and God is hiding from us humans. We are unable to see Him, we can only search for Him.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

Only the freedom of mind can prevent the state from becoming totalitarian and from issuing totalitarian demands.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

For a person who is dying only eternity counts.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

Today’s Communism can survive only if it abandons the myth of an infallible party, if it continues to think, and if it becomes democratic.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

Without tolerance, our world turns into hell.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

A state always calls itself fatherland when it is ready for murder.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

There are thoughts we must not think.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

The worst possible turn can not be programmed. It is caused by coincidence.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

Resistance at all cost is the most senseless act there is.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

Religion and political expediency go beautifully hand in hand.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

World history is tragic.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

Revolutions demand enormous sacrifices and, at the same time, create a new need to change the world again.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

There are risks which are not acceptable: the destruction of humanity is one of them.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

The freedom of each individual can only be the freedom of all.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

The difference between humans and wild animals is that humans pray before they commit murder.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

Someone who is about to die does not mourn the dead.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

Communism is a proposition to structure the world more reasonably, a proposition for changing the world. As such, we have to analyze it and, if we deem it reasonable, act upon it.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

The savages don’t have atom bombs.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

Before anything else, we need a new age of Enlightenment. Our present political systems must relinquish their claims on truth, justice and freedom and have to replace them with the search for truth, justice, freedom and reason.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

For people who have no critical acumen, a state is a mythical entity, for those who think critically it is a rational fiction, created by man in order to facilitate human coexistence.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

You can’t take back an act you were able to think.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

In a society which is structured the wrong way, piety has no effect.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

Our science has become terrible, our research dangerous, our findings deadly. We physicists have to make peace with reality. Reality is not as strong as we are. We will ruin reality.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

Justice is horrible.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

Today’s difference between Russia and the United States is that in Russia everybody takes everybody else for a spy, and in the United States everybody takes everybody else for a criminal.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

It is surely easier to confess a murder over a cup of coffee than in front of a jury.

– Friedrich Durrenmatt

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