Gerhard Richter Quotes

All those - or most of those - who went through the experience during the Second World War - they want to remember more - more and more. It's never enough because we feel that we have to tell the story. And no one can tell the story fully.

The opposite of war is not peace, it's creation.

I've walked on a lot of battlefields. Most of them are not haunted.

You must have seen great changes since you were a young man," said Winston tentatively. The old man's pale blue eyes moved from the darts board to the bar, and from the bar to the door of the Gents ... "The beer was better," he said finally. "And cheaper! When I was a young man, mild beer - wallop we used to call it - was fourpence a pint. That was before the war, of course." "Which war was that?" said Winston. "It's all wars," said the old man vaguely. He took up his glass, and his shoulders straightened again. "'Ere's wishing you the very best of 'ealth!

Blue is the smoke of wrar, white the bones of men.

To rob, to ravage, to murder, in their imposing language, are the arts of civil policy. When they have made the world a solitude, they call it peace.

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. We possess nothing certainly except the past.

Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that being nothing art everything? When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity - then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being nothing!

The pictorial battlefield becomes a sea of mud mercifully veiled by the fog of war.

People who get up early in the morning cause war, death and famine.

Then down came the lid--the day was lost, for art, at Sarajevo. World-politics stepped in, and a war was started which has not ended yet: a "war to end war." But it merely ended art. It did not end war.

The cannon thunders... limbs fly in all directions... one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice... it's Humanity in search of happiness.

Ignorant of the arts of luxury, the primitive Romans had improved the science of government and war.

Granted that every war is madness-civil war, fratricide, is the worst of all; it reaches deeper into ugliness, cruelty and absurdity.

Fear cripples faster than any implement of war.

Powder is but a thing of yesterday, and war is as old as the human race--unhappily.

There is pleasure in calm remembrance of a past sorrow.

Every nation has its prestigious military academies - or so few of them - that reach not only the virtues of peace but also the art of attaining it? I mean attaining and protecting it by means other than weapons, the tools of war. Why are we surprised whenever war recedes and yields to peace?

I went to war. .... I survived, while other men around me died. ... men whose lives were crunched up in mistakes, and thrown away by the wrong second of someone else's hate, or love, or indifference.

War is a series of disasters which result in a winner.

The chance of war Is equal, and the slayer oft is slain.

Cyber Leader: Daleks, be warned. You have declared war upon the Cybermen. Dalek Sec: This is not war - this is pest control! Cyber Leader: We have five million Cybermen. How many are you? Dalek Sec: Four. Cyber Leader: You would destroy the Cybermen with four Daleks? Dalek Sec: We would destroy the Cybermen with one Dalek! You superior in only one respect. Cyber Leader: What is that? Dalek Sec: You are better at dying.

And so long as they were at war, their power was preserved, but when they had attained empire they fell, for of the arts of peace they knew nothing, and had never engaged in any employment higher than war.

If the first casualty of war is innocence, then perhaps with each bullet fired, bomb detonated, leader overthrown, wall built, economy destroyed and family member killed, we are not creating goodwill and harmony, but rather another child who believes violence is the only means to bring about change in the world.