Herzog Quotes
"We are talking about the whole life of mankind. The subject is too great, too deep for such weakness, cowardice."
"Every man is a sucker for some type of broad."
"If you can get it up once a week, you should be grateful."
"To realize that you are a survivor is a shock."
"Unified by the horrible wars, instructed in our brutal stupidity by revolutions, perhaps we, modern humankind, have done the nearly impossible, namely, learned something."
"The visions of genius become the canned goods of the intellectuals."
"The old empires are shattered but those same one-time powers are richer than ever."
"What good are those effing eggheads! It takes an ignorant bastard like me to fight liberal causes."
"We're all whores in this world, and don't you forget it."
"What the fuck does he know what it is to face facts. All he wants is everybody should love him."
"The court doesn't care. You signed papers-did you read them?"
"Education? It's a laugh! You don't know what goes on."
"Spendthrift bitches!" he shouted at the women of his house.
"Do I ask for much? The old veteran cripple runs up and down City Hall, from courtroom to courtroom-out to Twenty-sixth and California."
"Moses-they're killing me! Killing their father!"
"We don't have to have porridge," said Herzog.
"You know, Moses, I've been to a psychiatrist about these effing dishes."
"Books-ideas. Take her for a walk. Discuss with her. Please, Moses, I'm begging you!"
"I hoped that Madeleine and I would settle down."
"Your brothers have done okay right here, in this town."
"Slow down. Stop knocking yourself out. I love you better than my own effing family."
"And a good lay, too. What's wrong with that?"
"You got trouble, I can see that. Jumping out of your skin."
"If nothing else, he was too rich in diseases to be satisfied with such a description."
"But when all was said and done, Madeleine didn't marry in the Church, nor did she baptize her daughter."
"I don't understand how it was possible, thought Herzog."
"Lord, I ran to fight in Thy holy cause, but kept tripping, never reached the scene of the struggle."
"Till we figure out what's what. Till the chance comes to exert a positive influence."
"But I know you, how lazy you are. Mothers' hearts are broken by mamzeirim like you!"
"Nachman! Did you think I'd ask for the money you owe me? I wrote that off, long ago."
"I felt it would be cheaper in the long run to send you back to New York."
"I suppose you'll start on my upbringing now-my lousy, free-loading bohemian family, all chiselers."
"Spending your dead father's money. Dear Daddy!"
"You'll never get the surroundings you want. Those are in the twelfth century somewhere."
"What makes you think I intend to have a lifelong affair with you? I want some action."
"Feel? Don't give me that line of platitudes about feelings. I don't believe in it."
"I believe in God-sin- death-so don't pull any sentimental crap on me."
"I punished myself for my sins," Madeleine repeated.
"In marrying you, she was in this mix-up and might have remained so but for a certain break."
"You must love her-I think you do.... Things are so complicated."
"I adore Madeleine, Tennie," he said. "You don't have to worry. I'll do everything possible."
"I love you better than my own effing family."
"The community in which we live will hardly bear to be told that every man should be open to ecstasy or a divine illumination."
"Each man is stubbornly, stubbornly himself. Above all himself, to the end of time."
"But do you call these men? We are only creatures."
"We do not love ourselves, but persist in stubbornness."
"The good die young, but I have been spared to build myself up so that I may end my life as good as gold."
"To behave with decency to another human being might also be 'gratuitous.'"
"Just as machinery has embodied ideas of good, so the technology of destruction has also acquired a metaphysical character."
"Intelligent people without influence feel a certain self-contempt, reflecting the contempt of those who hold real political or social power."
"Romanticism guarded the 'inspired condition,' preserved the poetic, philosophical, and religious teachings."
"To live in an inspired condition, to know truth, to be free, to love another, to consummate existence, to abide with death in clarity of consciousness without which, racing and conniving to evade death, the spirit holds its breath and hopes to be immortal because it does not live - is no longer a rarefied project."
"The individual is obliged, or put under pressure, to define 'power' as it is defined in politics, and to work out the personal consequences of this for himself."
"A new Utopian history, an idyll, comparing the present to an imaginary past, because we hate the world as it is."
"Good and Evil are real. The inspired condition is therefore no visionary matter."
"But some people are at war with the best things of life and pervert them into fantasies and dreams."
"She rated him higher than kings and presidents."
"The world should love lovers; but not theoreticians. Never theoreticians! Show them the door."
"I picked a lemon in the garden of love, where they say only peaches grow."
"The afternoon was ending, and in the widening area of demolition was a fire, fed by the wreckage."
"He inhaled the odors of stone, of urine, bitterly tonic, the smells of rust and of lubricants."
"The work of living is to manage the heart: always to make the necessary changes, from love, to hate, from hope to despair."
"Out of the burning, the dust, down the stairs he hurried underground."
"The most real question is how the organism maintains itself against death."
"To have a human life, and also an inhuman life. In fact, to have everything."
"Moral realities exist, as surely as there are molecular and atomic ones."
"The history of composure in Calvinistic societies, when each man, feeling fearful damnation, had to behave as one of the elect."
"Ruin comes to beauty, inevitably. The space-time continuum reclaims its elements."
"A true change of heart comes with a revolution in the depths of the soul."
"The beautiful supermachinery opening a new life for innumerable mankind."
"Every form of bondage is possible when the intellect is passive."
"A man's struggle with social injustice is often replaced by struggles with women, with children, with his 'unhappiness'."
"The sight of the fresh odor of soil, and he heard the women passing by, the rapid knocking of their heels on the crusty pavement."
"Subjective monstrosity must be overcome, must be corrected by community, by useful duty."
"Creative suffering, as you think... at the core of Christian belief."
"Justice! Look who wants justice! Most of mankind has lived and died without-totally without it."
"I love little pussy her coat is so warm, and I'll sit by the fire and give her some food, and pussy will love me because I am good."
"Social organization, for all its clumsiness and evil, has accomplished far more and embodies more good than I do."
"My God! Who is this creature? It considers itself human. But what is it? Not human of itself. But has the longing to be human."
"The human soul is an amphibian, and I have touched its sides."
"Demographers estimate that at least half of all the human beings ever born are alive now, in this century. What a moment for the human soul!"
"I'm a plain woman. Valentine is from upstate New York."
"Valentine comes home every night. He's never out late."
"The dream of man's heart, however much we may distrust and resent it, is that life may complete itself in significant pattern."
"To demand what is impossible for any human being, to exercise power where it can't be exercised, is tyranny."
"History is the history of cruelty, not love, as soft men think."
"Man is a foolish thing, a foolish thing. Folly and sin play all his game."
"The real and essential question is one of our employment by other human beings and their employment by us."
"The best-treated, most favored and intelligent part of any society is often the most ungrateful."
"The sight of her, the odor of her hair, this minute, makes me tremble with love."
"He does not need meaning as long as such intensity has scope."
"God ties all kinds of loose ends together. Who knows why!"
"History is the history of cruelty, not love, as soft men think. We have experimented with every human capacity to see which is strong and admirable and have shown that none is."
"Herzog's folly! Monument to his sincere and loving idiocy."
"I too have done my share of social climbing, with hauteur to spare."
"What a struggle I waged!-left-handed but fierce."
"Unemployed consciousness, he wrote in the pantry."
"He had to get water from the cistern; the pump was too rusty."
"But self-sufficiency and solitude, gentleness, it all was so tempting."
"I devoutly hoped Emmerich would find me sick."