Leipzig Quotes

Between a battle lost and a battle won,’ Napoleon had said on the eve of the battle of Leipzig, ‘the distance is immense and there stand empires.

March had a routine for reading the paper. He started at the back, with the truth. If Leipzig was said to have beaten Cologne four-nil at football, the chances were it was true: even the Party had yet to devise a means of rewriting the sports results. The sports news was a different matter. COUNTDOWN

In Leipzig [in the 14th century], the university found it necessary to promulgate a rule against throwing stones at the professors. As late as 1495, a German statute explicitly forbade anyone associated with the university from drenching freshmen with urine.

We all know that the un-examined life is not worth living (socrates). But if all you are doing is examining, you are not living.

Dodd could not grasp how these things could be occurring in the Germany he had known and loved as a young scholar in Leipzig.

Leipzig that the university had to pass a rule against throwing stones at professors.

In 1907, Haber was the first to obtain nitrogen, the main nutrient required for plant growth, directly from the air. In this way, from one day to the next, he addressed the scarcity of fertilizer that threatened to unleash an unprecedented global famine at the beginning of the twentieth century. Had it not been for Haber, hundreds of millions of people who until then had depended on natural fertilizers such as guano and saltpetre for their crops would have died from lack of nourishment. In prior centuries, Europe’s insatiable hunger had driven bands of Englishmen as far as Egypt to despoil the tombs of the ancient pharaohs, in search not of gold, jewels or antiquities, but of the nitrogen contained in the bones of the thousands of slaves buried along with the Nile pharaohs, as sacrificial victims, to serve them even after their deaths. The English tomb raiders had exhausted the reserves in continental Europe; they dug up more than three million human skeletons, along with the bones of hundreds of thousands of dead horses that soldiers had ridden in the battles of Austerlitz, Leipzig and Waterloo, sending them by ship to the port of Hull in the north of England, where they were ground in the bone mills of Yorkshire to fertilize the verdant fields of Albion.

Fermi sent them out again in the early 1930s, after the decision to go into nuclear physics: Segrè to work with Otto Stern in Hamburg, Amaldi to Leipzig to the laboratory of the physical chemist Peter Debye, Rasetti to Lise Meitner at the KWI.

I ask for the Scripture, and Eck offers me the Fathers. I ask for the sun, and he shows me his lanterns. I ask, “where is your Scripture proof?” and he adduces Ambrose and Cyril. . . . With all due respect to the Fathers, I prefer the authority of Scripture.

the first and most important of the early notices of Bach was the obituary article, or “Nekrolog,” contributed by his son, Carl Philipp Emmanuel, and Johann Friedrich Agricola, one of Bach's most distinguished pupils, to the fourth volume of Mizler's Musikalische Bibliothek, published at Leipzig in 1754.

I can tell you,” my colleague went on, “of a man in Leipzig, a judge. He was not a Nazi, except nominally, but he certainly wasn’t an anti-Nazi. He was just—a judge. In ’42 or ’43, early ’43, I think it was, a Jew was tried before him in a case involving, but only incidentally, relations with an ‘Aryan’ woman. This was ‘race injury,’ something the Party was especially anxious to punish. In the case at bar, however, the judge had the power to convict the man of a ‘nonracial’ offense and send him to an ordinary prison for a very long term, thus saving him from Party ‘processing’ which would have meant concentration camp or, more probably, deportation and death. But the man was innocent of the ‘nonracial’ charge, in the judge’s opinion, and so, as an honorable judge, he acquitted him. Of course, the Party seized the Jew as soon as he left the courtroom.” “And the judge?” “Yes, the judge. He could not get the case off his conscience—a case, mind you, in which he had acquitted an innocent man. He thought that he should have convicted him and saved him from the Party, but how could he have convicted an innocent man? The thing preyed on him more and more, and he had to talk about it, first to his family, then to his friends, and then to acquaintances. (That’s how I heard about it.) After the ’44 Putsch they arrested him. After that, I don’t know.” I said nothing.

Mein Schatten ruft mich? Was liegt an meinem Schatten! Mag er mir nachlaufen! ich – laufe ihm davon.

I didn’t ask any of the right questions,” I said to Dr. Leipzig. “That’s because you didn’t know what questions to ask,” she answered. “You thought the doctors would lead the conversation, and they didn’t.” “I did the best I could. I did the best I could, and it wasn’t good enough.” “That’s because of the system,” Dr. Leipzig said. “You can’t do better than you did in this system. Hold on to that.

The church must change, Brother,' Gheorg had said one day long ago, back when they were still theology students at the University of Leipzig. Christian faith cannot be the tool of a monarch who sells God's pardon in exchange for money and power. Our Lord speaks to ALL men, Mathias. The Church must be a place where all men can meet and pray, not a place where they must submit to the power of other men. God's word must reach everyone equally.

How do you get into making video games anyway? Sadie hated answering this question, especially after a person told her he hadn't heard of Ichigo. "Well, I learned to program computers in middle school, I got an 800 on my math SAT, won a Westinghouse and a Leipzig, and then I went to MIT, which, by the way, is highly competitive, even for a lowly female like myself, and studied computer science. At MIT, I learned four or five more programming languages and studied psychology with an emphasis on ludic techniques and persuasive designs, and English, including narrative structures, the classics, and the history of interactive storytelling. Got myself a great mentor. Regrettably made him my boyfriend. Suffice it to say, I was young. And then I dropped out of school for a time to make a game because my best frenemy wanted me to. That game became the game you never heard of. But yeah, it sold around two and a half million copies, just in the U.S., so...." Instead, she said, "I like to play games a lot, so I thought I'd see if I could make them.

As night falls the city extricates itself from the work of the day and the stars prepare to come out. These were not the stars I was used to in the skies of my town and in the Land of Israel, but they are stars nevertheless. I'm grateful to them because even in a strange land they console me.

Heute habe ich, der Zoologe, gelernt: Die afrikanische Wüstenheuschrecke hat eine ostdeutsche Verwandte, die Bücherheuschrecke (Locusta bibliophila), eine Spezies auf zwei Beinen, gekleidet in „Wisent“- oder „Boxer“-Jeans, selbstgestrickte Rollkragenpullover und olivgrüne oder erdbraune „Kutten“ (Parkas). […] Die Locusta bibliophila ernährt sich von Büchern, allerdings nur von solchen aus dem Nichtsozialistischen Wirtschaftsgebiet. Der Angriff der Bücherheuschrecke wird Wochen vor dem Leipziger Schlaraffenland-Ereignis generalstabsmäßig geplant […] Die Rüstung der Bücherheuschrecke (besagter „Messe-Mantel“, Typ Parka) wird etwa zwei Wochen vor der Schlacht einer gründlichen Überprüfung unerzogen; rechte Innenseite: in zwei Reihen nebeneinander je fünf Taschen, von Überbrust- bis in etwa Kniehöhe eingenäht (teilweise überlappend), Format 21 x 13 cm, die Leichtgängigkeit wird mittels des in der Pelzschneiderei „Harmonie“ befindlichen Exemplars Heinrich Böll, „Wanderer kommst du nach Spa…“ kontrolliert […]. Der Angriff der Bücherheuschrecke vollzieht sich in Wellen, sein unmittelbar bevorstehender Beginn wird dem scharfen Beobachter dadurch kenntlich, dass sich die ohnehin immer gierig blickenden Augen zu Hungerschlitzen verengen.

8. Quoted in Clive Leatherdale, Dracula: The Novel and the Legend (Wellingborough, Northants: Aquarian Press, 1985), p. 80. 9. H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1898), Book II, Ch. II, p. 202. 10. Ibid., pp. 201, 200. 11. E. J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 192. 12. On this important subject, see Daniel Pick’s Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder c. 1848 – c. 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and his ‘ “Terrors of the night”: Dracula and “Degeneration” in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Critical Quarterly (Winter 1988). 13. For an account of and extracts from books such as these, see The Victorian Imagination: A Sampler, ed. Richard Manton (New York: Grove

In 1604, at the height of his scientific career, Galileo argued that for a rectilinear motion in which speed increases proportionally to distance covered, the law of motion should be just that (x = ct^2) which he had discovered in the investigation of falling bodies. Between 1695 and 1700 not a single one of the monthly issues of Leipzig’s Acta Eruditorum was published without articles of Leibniz, the Bernoulli brothers or the Marquis de l'Hôpital treating, with notation only slightly different from that which we use today, the most varied problems of differential calculus, integral calculus and the calculus of variations. Thus in the space of almost precisely one century infinitesimal calculus or, as we now call it in English, The Calculus, the calculating tool par excellence, had been forged; and nearly three centuries of constant use have not completely dulled this incomparable instrument.

Tamara Bunke was the only woman to fight alongside “Che” during his Bolivian campaign. She was an East German national, born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on November 19, 1937, of Communist activist parents. As a child, her home was frequently used for meetings, hiding weapons and conducting other Communist activities. After World War II, in 1952 she returned to Germany where she attended Humboldt University in Berlin. Tamara met “Che” Guevara when she was an attractive 23-year-old woman in Leipzig, and he was with a Cuban Trade Delegation. The two instantly hit it off as she cozied up to him and, having learned how to fight and use weapons in Pinar del Rio in western Cuba, she joined his expedition to Bolivia. Becoming a spy for the ELN, she adopted the name “Tania” and posed as a right-wing authority of South-American music and folklore. In disguise, she managed to warm up to and entice Bolivian President René Barrientos. She even went on an intimate vacation to Peru with him.

Die Zeit, dies große Geschenk der Gottheit, von so vielen auf das undankbarste vernachlässigt, muß dem Studierenden kostbarer, als fast jedem andern Stande seyn, vor allen andern aber ist die Periode der akademischen Jahre bis auf die kleinste Minute schätzenswerth und wichtig. [...] Um Zeit zu gewinnen, muß man sie theils dem übermäßigen langen Schlafe entziehn, theils die zu vielen, dem zweckwidrigen Vergnügen bestimmten Stunden aus seinem Plane streichen. Man darf nur täglich zwey Stunden früher als bisher aufstehen, so sind, wenn man vier Jahre auf der Universität zugebracht hat, siebenzehn volle Wochen gewonnen! Ein unendlich wichtiger Zeitüberfluß, binnen vier Jahren siebenzehn Wochen länger zu leben. Besiegt man seine Schlafsucht auch nach Verlauf der akademischen Lebenszeit [...], so lebt man alle zwölf Jahre ein ganzes Jahr länger, und hat drey Jahre mehr Erfahrungen und mehr Kenntnisse gesammelt. Vertraute Briefe an alle edelgesinnte Jünglinge die auf Universitäten gehen wollen. Leipzig 1792, S.120ff.

Benjamin Libet, a scientist in the physiology department of the University of California, San Francisco, was a pioneering researcher into the nature of human consciousness. In one famous experiment he asked a study group to move their hands at a moment of their choosing while their brain activity was being monitored. Libet was seeking to identify what came first — the brain’s electrical activity to make the hand move or the person’s conscious intention to make their hand move. It had to be the second one, surely? But no. Brain activity to move the hand was triggered a full half a second before any conscious intention to move it…. John-Dylan Haynes, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Studies in Leipzig, Germany, led a later study that was able to predict an action ten seconds before people had a conscious intention to do it. What was all the stuff about free will? Frank Tong, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, said: “Ten seconds is a lifetime in terms of brain activity.” So where is it coming from if not ‘us,’ the conscious mind?

That night, atrocities were being committed by civilised Germans all over Leipzig, all over the country. Nearly every Jewish home and business in my city was vandalised, burned or otherwise destroyed, as were our synagogues. As were our people. It wasn’t just Nazi soldiers and fascist thugs who turned against us. Ordinary citizens, our friends and neighbours since before I was born, joined in the violence and the looting. When the mob was done destroying property, they rounded up Jewish people – many of them young children – and threw them into the river that I used to skate on as a child. The ice was thin and the water freezing. Men and women I’d grown up with stood on the riverbanks, spitting and jeering as people struggled. ‘Shoot them!’ they cried. ‘Shoot the Jewish dogs!’ What had happened to my German friends that they became murderers? How is it possible to create enemies from friends, to create such hate? Where was the Germany I had been so proud to be a part of, the country where I was born, the country of my ancestors? One day we were friends, neighbours, colleagues, and the next we were told we were sworn enemies. When I think of those Germans relishing our pain, I want to ask them, ‘Have you got a soul? Have you got a heart?’ It was madness, in the true sense of the word – otherwise civilised people lost all ability to tell right from wrong. They committed terrible atrocities, and worse, they enjoyed it. They thought they were doing the right thing. And even those who could not fool themselves that we Jews were the enemy did nothing to stop the mob. If enough people had stood up then, on Kristallnacht, and said, ‘Enough! What are you doing? What is wrong with you?’ then the course of history would have been different. But they did not. They were scared. They were weak. And their weakness allowed them to be manipulated into hatred. As they loaded me onto a truck to take me away, blood mixing with the tears on my face, I stopped being proud to be German. Never again.

One way to try to answer the question “What makes us human?” is to ask “What makes us different from great apes?” or, to be more precise, from nonhuman apes, since, of course, humans are apes. As just about every human by now knows—and as the experiments with Dokana once again confirm—nonhuman apes are extremely clever. They’re capable of making inferences, of solving complex puzzles, and of understanding what other apes are (and are not) likely to know. When researchers from Leipzig performed a battery of tests on chimpanzees, orangutans, and two-and-a-half-year-old children, they found that the chimps, the orangutans, and the kids performed comparably on a wide range of tasks that involved understanding of the physical world. For example, if an experimenter placed a reward inside one of three cups, and then moved the cups around, the apes found the goody just as often as the kids—indeed, in the case of chimps, more often. The apes seemed to grasp quantity as well as the kids did—they consistently chose the dish containing more treats, even when the choice involved using what might loosely be called math—and also seemed to have just as good a grasp of causality. (The apes, for instance, understood that a cup that rattled when shaken was more likely to contain food than one that did not.) And they were equally skillful at manipulating simple tools. Where the kids routinely outscored the apes was in tasks that involved reading social cues. When the children were given a hint about where to find a reward—someone pointing to or looking at the right container—they took it. The apes either didn’t understand that they were being offered help or couldn’t follow the cue. Similarly, when the children were shown how to obtain a reward, by, say, ripping open a box, they had no trouble grasping the point and imitating the behavior. The apes, once again, were flummoxed. Admittedly, the kids had a big advantage in the social realm, since the experimenters belonged to their own species. But, in general, apes seem to lack the impulse toward collective problem-solving that’s so central to human society. “Chimps do a lot of incredibly smart things,” Michael Tomasello, who heads the institute’s department of developmental and comparative psychology, told me. “But the main difference we’ve seen is 'putting our heads together.' If you were at the zoo today, you would never have seen two chimps carry something heavy together. They don’t have this kind of collaborative project.

The craze surrounding the Beatles—as well as demonstrations and a near-riot by hundreds of kids in Leipzig in October 1965 after authorities there banned almost all the local Beat bands—elicited commentary directly from head of state Walter Ulbricht during a meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party: I am of the opinion, comrades, that we should put an end to the monotony of the Yeah Yeah Yeah and whatever else it’s called. Must we really copy every piece of garbage that comes from the West?

Harris himself was not the villain of Dresden. The decision to mount the raids, and those on Berlin, Leipzig and Chemnitz, was taken by the combined US, Russian and British Chiefs of Staff, fully supported by Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. It was Harris’s duty to execute their orders. Nor was Harris the architect of area bombing, a policy already in place when, in 1942, he became C-in-C of Bomber Command.

Luther’s chronic stomach troubles have also been linked to a psychosomatic problem. His neurotic phobias all seemed to go directly to his stomach, destroying his digestion. His problem with flatulence has become legendary, due in part to his own exaggeration of it. His writings are sprinkled with references to his constant belching and breaking of wind. He said, “If I break wind in Wittenburg, they will hear it in Leipzig.” Fortunately Luther was able to find a sanctified use for his flatulence. He advised his students that the breaking of wind was a most effective device to repel the attacks of the devil. Elsewhere Luther spoke of resisting Satan by throwing an inkwell at him. Luther described his battle with Satan in the terms of a man under siege. He was sure that he was a personal target of the prince of hell.

Two German-held villages, Mametz and Montauban, were captured on July 1, as well as a German strongpoint, the Leipzig Redoubt. The human cost of the day’s attack was higher than on any other single day of battle in the First World War. Just over a thousand British officers and more than 20,000 men were killed, and 25,000 seriously wounded.

Melchior Lotther, originally from Leipzig, who printed Luther’s Bible in both Low and High German on three printing presses working simultaneously. It was the first good translation of a Bible into spoken language.