Friedrich Durrenmatt
The world is bad but not without hope. It is only hopeless when you look at it from an ideal viewpoint.Collection: Hope
Someone who is about to die does not mourn the dead.Collection: Death
Power is paradoxical.Collection: Power
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.Collection: Science
We do not consider patriotism desirable if it contradicts civilized behavior.Collection: Patriotism
Emotions have no place in business, unless you do business with them.Collection: Business
Pretend to be dumb, that's the only way to reach old age.Collection: Age
So then learn to conquer your fear. This is the only art we have to master nowadays: to look at things without fear, and to fearlessly do right.Collection: Fear
The difference between humans and wild animals is that humans pray before they commit murder.
Truth is always a delusion.
A state always calls itself fatherland when it is ready for murder.
Whoever is content with the world, and who profits from its lack of justice, does not want to change it.
A story is not finished, until it took the worst turn.
Who sows fear, reaps weapons.
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.
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.
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.
The rightful claim to dissent is an existential right of the individual.
The savages don't have atom bombs.
World history is tragic.
Nothing that has been thought can ever be taken back.
In a society which is structured the wrong way, piety has no effect.
The freedom of each individual can only be the freedom of all.
For a person who is dying only eternity counts.
There are thoughts we must not think.
Justice is horrible.
The problems of all of humanity can only be solved by all of humanity.
Everything in the world can be changed, my dear Florestan, but the human being.
Above all, be suspicious of your fatherland. Nobody is more inclined to become a murderer than a fatherland.
It is inhuman to continue a war which could easily be ended.
One does not set fire to a world which is already lost.
The worst possible turn can not be programmed. It is caused by coincidence.
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.
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.
When death has you by the throat, you don't mince words.
A major power can afford a military debacle only when it looks like a political victory.
A story has been thought through to the end when it has taken the worst possible turn.
The art of the cuisine, when fully mastered, is the one human capability of which only good things can be said.
Only the freedom of mind can prevent the state from becoming totalitarian and from issuing totalitarian demands.
Man is imperfect. The reality he creates is always endangered by man.
Revolutions demand enormous sacrifices and, at the same time, create a new need to change the world again.
News reports don't change the world. Only facts change it, and those have already happened when we get the news.
There are risks which are not acceptable: the destruction of humanity is one of them.
It is surely easier to confess a murder over a cup of coffee than in front of a jury.
We are the world.
You can't take back an act you were able to think.
It is easy to kill when you don't see your victim.
Human life is beyond comprehension.
I am a man, and God is hiding from us humans. We are unable to see Him, we can only search for Him.
People like us who are on their last leg can only understand comedies.