Henry Rollins Quotes

The one great exception to the apathy on reunification is, naturally enough, Berlin. Encircled by the hostile Soviet Zone for ten years, at times blockaded and constantly at the Russians' mercy, Berliners are committed to this one goal with a unique urgency.

When I was 16, I went to Berlin - West Berlin, since at that time a wall still divided the city - to live for three months with a family on an exchange program.

My father loved to take us on historical vacations, and you should have seen the stares we received in East Berlin.

The Berlin Wall go down, that was the most wonderful thing that could happen, absolutely. I celebrated with everybody in Berlin that day when the Wall was down.

I grew up in East Germany, so we had to learn Russian in school... everybody hated it. I never thought it would come in handy... And being an actor, I've been able to use it quite a bit.

There is an iron curtain across Europe.

Today on the NATO line, our military forces face east to prevent a possible invasion. On the other side of the line, the Soviet forces also face east to prevent their people from leaving.

I grew up in East Berlin, in a family of artists.

As a 7-year-old child, I saw the Wall being erected. No one - although it was a stark violation of international law - believed at the time that one ought to intervene militarily in order to protect citizens of the GDR and whole Eastern bloc, of the consequences of that - namely, to live in lack of freedom for many, many years.

I can understand the Chinese Wall: it was built as a defense against marauders. But a wall such as that in Berlin, built to prevent people from seeking freedom, is almost beyond comprehension.

If the purpose of the wall was to destroy Berlin, Herr Ulbricht and his cohorts have erred sadly. Berlin is not only going to continue to exist - it's going to grow and grow and grow. Its ties to West Germany will not be severed.

I always used the free room that the G.D.R. allowed me... There was no shadow over my childhood.

Certainly my parents were very political, so the whole Berlin Wall thing - and being a kid of the '80s - that's just something that's in your experience.

The Berlin Wall is the defining achievement of socialism.

The fascination for me writing about crime in Berlin was the idea that there was this much bigger crime taking place in the background, a fantastically epochal moment in history which is just going on. That just sort of makes the whole thing have a greater resonance.

I have seen and drawn dying, poisoned worlds. I published a book of drawings called 'Death of Wood' about one such world, on the border between the Federal Republic of Germany and what was then still the German Democratic Republic.

I grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse.

When I was a kid, while touring East Berlin - back when there was an East Berlin - I got my left foot stuck in an escalator in Alexanderplatz. A few hours later, thanks to blowtorches and chainsaws and East German soldiers and the U.S. Embassy, my foot was released, and I along with it.

I was thinking of writers living in East Europe before the Berlin Wall came down. They wrote fantastic stuff but were dealing with a situation that was almost impossible to deal with, but they found a way.

After the turmoil of the Second World War, my family ended up in Russian-occupied East Germany. When I attended fourth grade, I had to learn Russian as my first foreign language in school. I found this quite difficult because of the Cyrillic alphabet, but as time went on, I seemed to do all right.

When I was 11 years old, my family had to leave East Germany and begin a new life in West Germany overnight. Until my father could get back into his original profession as a government employee, my parents operated a small laundry business in our little town. I became the laundry delivery boy.

When I turned 11, we had to leave East Germany overnight because of the political orientation of my father. Now I was going to school in West Germany, which was American-occupied at that time. There in school, all children were required to learn English and not Russian. To learn Russian had been difficult, but English was impossible for me.

There are many people in the world who really don't understand-or say they don't-what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin!

The Wall will be standing in 50 and even in 100 years, if the reasons for it are not removed.

I was in Germany when the wall came down.