Berlin Wall Quotes

“The same rightists who decades ago were shouting, 'Better dead than red!' are now often heard mumbling, 'Better red than eating hamburgers.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“He was a commander in the Russian army at a time when the Russians were our enemies and still part of the Soviet Union . This wasn't very long ago, Alex.The collapse of communism. It was only in 1989 that the Berlin Wall came down." She stopped. "I suppose none of this means very much to you."

"Well, it wouldn't," Alex said. "I was only two years old.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Skeleton Key

“Walls in people's heads are sometimes more durable than walls made of concrete blocks.”
― Willy Brandt, Erinnerungen

“Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, historians have become both more accurate and more honest—fractionally more brave, one might say—about that 'other' cleansing of the regions and peoples that were ground to atoms between the upper and nether millstones of Hitlerism and Stalinism. One of the most objective chroniclers is Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University. In his view, it is still 'Operation Reinhardt,' or the planned destruction of Polish Jewry, that is to be considered as the centerpiece of what we commonly call the Holocaust, in which of the estimated 5.7 million Jewish dead, 'roughly three million were prewar Polish citizens.' We should not at all allow ourselves to forget the millions of non-Jewish citizens of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and other Slav territories who were also massacred. But for me the salient fact remains that anti-Semitism was the regnant, essential, organizing principle of all the other National Socialist race theories. It is thus not to be thought of as just one prejudice among many.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Beyond all of that, I could see the wall I had seen from inside the train, the wall that runs along the train line. I assumed that there, behind it, was the west, and I was right. I could have been wrong, but I was right.' If she had any future it was over there, and she needed to get to it.
I sit in the chair exploring the meaning of dumbstruck, rolling the word around in my mind. I laugh with Miriam as she laughs at herself, and at the boldness of being sixteen. At sixteen you are invulnerable. I laugh with her about rummaging around for a ladder in other people's sheds, and I laugh harder when she finds one. We laugh at the improbability of it, of someone barely more than a child poking around in Beatrix Potter's garden by the Wall, watching out for Mr McGregor and his blunderbuss, and looking for a step-ladder to scale one of the most fortified barriers on earth. We both like the girl she was, and I like the woman she has become.
She says suddenly, 'I still have the scars on my hands from climbing the barbed wire, but you can't see them so well now.' She holds out her hands. The soft parts of her palms are crazed with definite white scares, each about a centimeter long.
The first fence was wire mesh with a roll of barbed wire along the top.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“Abundance in life is achieved only when we tear down walls and fill our lives with light.”
― Seth Adam Smith, Your Life Isn't for You: A Selfish Person's Guide to Being Selfless

“Through Jimi Hendrix's music you can almost see the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and of Martin Luther King Junior, the beginnings of the Berlin Wall, Yuri Gagarin in space, Fidel Castro and Cuba, the debut of Spiderman, Martin Luther King Junior’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, Ford Mustang cars, anti-Vietnam protests, Mary Quant designing the mini-skirt, Indira Gandhi becoming the Prime Minister of India, four black students sitting down at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro North Carolina, President Johnson pushing the Civil Rights Act, flower children growing their hair long and practicing free love, USA-funded IRA blowing up innocent civilians on the streets and in the pubs of Great Britain, Napalm bombs being dropped on the lush and carpeted fields of Vietnam, a youth-driven cultural revolution in Swinging London, police using tear gas and billy-clubs to break up protests in Chicago, Mods and Rockers battling on Brighton Beach, Native Americans given the right to vote in their own country, the United Kingdom abolishing the death penalty, and the charismatic Argentinean Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. It’s all in Jimi’s absurd and delirious guitar riffs.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“These handkerchief gardens are a traditional German solution to apartment dwellers' yearning for a tool shed and a vegetable garden. They make a patchwork of green in odd corners of urban land, along train lines or canals or, as here, in the lee of the Wall.”
― Anna Funder

“Putin was a former KGB intelligence officer who’d been stationed in East Germany at the Dresden headquarters of the Soviet secret service. Putin has said in interviews that he dreamed as a child of becoming a spy for the communist party in foreign lands, and his time in Dresden exceeded his imagination. Not only was he living out his boyhood fantasy, he and his then-wife also enjoyed the perks of a borderline-European existence. Even in communist East Germany, the standard of living was far more comfortable than life in Russia, and the young Putins were climbing KGB social circles, making influential connections, networking a power base.

The present was bright, and the future looked downright luminous.

Then, the Berlin wall fell, and down with it crashed Putin’s world. A few days after the fall, a group of East German protestors gathered at the door of the secret service headquarters building. Putin, fearing the headquarters would be overrun, dialed up a Red Army tank unit stationed nearby to ask for protection. A voice on the other end of the line told him the unit could not do anything without orders from Moscow. And, “Moscow is silent,” the man told Putin.

Putin’s boyhood dream was dissolving before his eyes, and his country was impotent or unwilling to stop it. Putin despised his government’s weakness in the face of threat. It taught him a lesson that would inform his own rule: Power is easily lost when those in power allow it to be taken away.

In Putin’s mind, the Soviet Union’s fatal flaw was not that its authoritarianism was unsustainable but that its leaders were not strong enough or brutal enough to maintain their authority.

The lesson Putin learned was that power must be guarded with vigilance and maintained by any means necessary.”
― Matt Szajer, The Trump-Russia Hustle: The Truth about Russia's attack on America & how Donald Trump turned Republicans into Putin's puppets

“Jetzt sind wir in einer Situation, in der wieder zusammenwächst, was zusammengehört.“

("Now we are in a situation where what belongs together, will grow back together.")

Berlin radio interview, November 10, 1989 [the day after the de facto abolition of intra-German border controls by the East German government]”
― Willy Brandt

“Auch wenn zwei Staaten in Deutschland existieren, sind sie doch füreinander nicht Ausland; ihre Beziehungen zueinander können nur von besonderer Art sein."

("Even though two states in Germany exist, they are not foreign countries to each other—their relations with each other can only be of a special kind.")

First Inaugural Address as West German Chancellor, October 28, 1969”
― Willy Brandt

“[I]ch habe es noch in diesem Sommer erneut zu Papier gebracht: Berlin wird leben, und die Mauer wird fallen."

("I put it down on paper again in the summer of this year: Berlin will live, and the Wall will come down.")

Speech at Rathaus Schöneberg (Berlin City Hall) on November 10, 1989 [the day after the de facto abolition of intra-German border controls by the East German government]”
― Willy Brandt

“Die Mauer in meinem Gedächtnis besteht weiter aus den bewaffneten Männern, die bereit waren, nach einer Anweisung auf Menschen zu schießen.
Auf unserem wasserblauen Planeten werden immer wieder neue Mauern gebaut. Wo eine Mauer steht, ist das Leben auf beiden Seiten bedroht.”
― Yōko Tawada, akzentfrei. Literarische Essays

“a thought she'd once had about Lamb was that when they'd pulled the Wall down he'd built himself another, and had been living behind it ever since”
― Mick Herron, Real Tigers

“There's another picture of the two of them, she with her arms around him, looking at the camera. She is an apparition, a naughty angel caught flying over the Wall, put in a cage, and then let out, here with her beloved.”
― Anna Funder , Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“Und Berlin? Und die Mauer? Die Stadt wird leben, und die Mauer wird fallen. Aber eine isolierte Berlin-Lösung, eine, die nicht mit weiterreichenden Veränderungen in Europa und zwischen den Teilen Deutschlands einhergeht, ist immer illusionär gewesen und im Laufe der Jahre nicht wahrscheinlich geworden."

("And Berlin? And the Wall? The city will remain alive, and the Wall is going to come down. But an isolated solution for Berlin, one that does not go hand in hand with the broader changes in Europe and between the two parts of Germany, has always been illusionary and has not become any more probable over the course of the years.")”
― Willy Brandt, Erinnerungen

“In hindsight, it's seen as inevitable that the two Germany's would reunite. But none of the people who had laid the groundwork for the fall-those who had started the tremors and endured the security forces' brutality-envisioned a unified Germany. Those people had sacrificed their places in society for the chance to form a new one, something different and distinct, an independent East Germany built form scratch. The hadn't looked to the West for inspiration before, and none of them looked to the West for salvation now that the border was open.”
― Tim Mohr, Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

“The ethos of East Berlin punk infused the city with a radical egalitarianism and a DIY approach to maintaining independence-to conjuring up the world you want to live in regardless of the situation or surroundings.”
― Tim Mohr, Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

“To this day, I attempt to walk through walls, real and imagined, external and internal. Sometimes in the midst of stress, insanity, wannabe dictators, wars, cruelty, injustice, greed, quarantines, pandemic viruses, I think back to those days along these roads.
In my mind, I have never stopped walking.”
― Kevin James Shay, Walking through the Wall

“The fall of the Berlin Wall was the fall of the madness!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“La chute du mur de Berlin a été la chute de la folie!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Il me dit aussi que de nombreuses parties du mur de Berlin sont détruites petit à petit pour faire place aux constructions modernes. Va-t-on se souvenir du passé ? La preuve que non, aujourd'hui encore, d'autres murs sont construits.”
― Mirelle Hdb, #Love(ly) Story (Lovely Projets)

“She just wanted to be herself, and doing, saying, reading and writing the things that would have made her feel like herself were all verboten.”
― Tim Mohr, Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

“Kids in tje East had also grown up with a genuine sense of fear that the world might actually come to an end during their lifetime. That it probably would in fact. For some this fueled nihilistic feelings - one reason Toster from Die Anderen, for instance, never got deeply political was because he stopped giving a shit.”
― Tim Mohr, Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

“Mistaking cause and effect was the single most critical misreading of the lessons of 1989.”
― Michael R. Meyer, The Year That Changed The World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall

“As turning points in history go, this was pretty ad hoc . . . it was the shrug that changed the world.”
― Michael R. Meyer, The Year That Changed The World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall