10 Quotes by Victor Klemperer

Academics love the semicolon; their hankering after logic demands a division which is more emphatic than a comma, but not quite as absolute a demarcation as a full stop.

National Socialism adapts Fascism, Bolshevism, Americanism, works it all into Teutonic Romanticism.

To me the Zionists, who want to go back to the Jewish state of A.D. 70 (destruction of Jerusalem by Titus) are just as offensive as the Nazis. With their nosing after blood, their ancient "cultural roots," their partly canting, partly obtuse winding back of the world they are altogether a match for the National Socialists. That is the fantastic thing about the National Socialists, that they simultaneously share in a community of ideas with Soviet Russia and with Zion.

That is the fantastic thing about the National Socialists, that they simultaneously share in a community of ideas with Soviet Russia and with Zion.

I changed Lessing’s35 words – Anyone who does not lose his reason over certain things, has no reason – into: Anyone whose heart remains calm today, has no heart.

The dominant feeling is that this reign of terror can hardly last long, but that its fall will bury us.

Pity is such a shabby thing. I can torment myself with wanting to feel pity, and yet I don’t succeed.

Always the same seesaw. The fear that my scribbling could get me put into a concentration camp. The feeling that it is my duty to write, that it is my life’s task, my calling. The feeling of vanitas vanitatum, that my scribbling is worthless. In the end I go on writing anyway, the diary, the Curriculum.

Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all.