“An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.”

—  Thomas Mann

Speech at the Prussian Academy of Art in Berlin (22 January 1929); also in Essays of Three Decades (1942)

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Thomas Mann159
German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate 1875–1955

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