Germans/history

Famous quotes containing the words germans and/or history:

“The Germans are always too late. They are late, like music, which is always the last of the arts to express a world condition,—when that world condition is already in its final stages. They are abstract and mystical.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)

“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)