“The world is just a barrel-organ which the Lord God turns Himself. We all have to dance to the tune which is already on the drum.”

—  Reinhard Heydrich

Heydrich recited this, one of his father's operas, on his deathbed during one of Himmler's visits on 2 June 1941.
Source: [Lehrer, Steven, Steven Lehrer, 2000, 86, Wannsee House and the Holocaust, McFarland, Jefferson, NC, 978-0-7864-0792-7, harv]

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The world is just a barrel-organ which the Lord God turns Himself. We all have to dance to the tune which is already on…" by Reinhard Heydrich?
Reinhard Heydrich photo
Reinhard Heydrich 4
German Nazi official during World War II 1904–1942

Related quotes

Louis Tronson photo

“Do we have all the hatred and all the aversion for the world which Our Lord requires, and which his example must inspire in us?”

Louis Tronson (1622–1700) French Roman Catholic priest

Avons-nous pour le monde toute la haine et toute l'aversion que Notre Seigneur demande, et que nous doit inspirer son exemple?
Examens particuliers sur divers sujets, p. 321 http://books.google.com/books?id=esY9AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA321 as translated by Mary Ilford in The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1968), p. 116
Examens particuliers sur divers sujets [Examination of Conscience upon Special Subjects] (1690)

“The Lost Music was his way of talking about the way he believed that old wives' tales and dance tunes and folktales were just the tangled echoes of something that's not quite of this world … something we all knew once, but have forgotten since.”

Charles de Lint (1951) author

Part One: The Hidden People, "The Quarrlsome Piper" p. 19
The Little Country (1991)

Attar of Nishapur photo

“Know then, that both this visible world and that
Which unseen is, alike are God Himself,
Naught is, save God: and all that is, is God.”

Attar of Nishapur (1145–1230) Persian Sufi poet

"All Pervading Consciousness"
Context: Yet what are seas and what is air? For all
Is God, and but a talisman are heaven and earth
To veil Divinity. For heaven and earth,
Did He not permeate them, were but names;
Know then, that both this visible world and that
Which unseen is, alike are God Himself,
Naught is, save God: and all that is, is God.

John Galsworthy photo

“Life calls the tune, we dance.”

John Galsworthy (1867–1933) English novelist and playwright
Rousas John Rushdoony photo

“The most common term in the New Testament for Jesus Christ is again Lord in the Greek Kyrios; Lord. What does it mean? It means sovereign. It means absolute owner so that if we have a Lord we are His property. To confess Jesus Christ as Lord is to declare that we belong to Him in all that we are and in all that we have. We give ourselves, we give our children, we give our property, we give our income, everything, it belongs to the Lord and we are stewards of that which we are and that which we posses under Him. God is the Lord. Jesus Christ is the lord. This is the basic confession of all of scripture. The basic term; let me repeat applied to God the Father and to God the son in all of scripture is Lord. The term is used so much so that it probably outnumbers all other terms used for God. Lordship. It means sovereignty. Dominion means the exercise of authority under a sovereign.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, Dominion (n. d.)

“Almost every organization… exhibits two faces — a smiling face which it turns toward its members and a frowning face which it turns to the world outside.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1950s, The Organizational Revolution: A study in the ethics of economic organization, 1953, p. 10 as cited in: Joseph T. Mahoney & Anne S. Huff (1993) Toward a New Social Contract. Theory in Organization Science https://ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/30105/towardnewsocialc93136maho.pdf?sequence=2 Faculty paper, University of Illinois at Urbana

Albert Einstein photo

“I claim credit for nothing. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

1920s, Viereck interview (1929)

Jakob Böhme photo

“We men have one book in common which points to God. Each has it within himself, which is the priceless Name of God.”

Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) German Christian mystic and theologian

Explaining his symbol of the within the human heart, in Libri Apologetici (1730), Book I, as quoted in The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928) by Manly P. Hall, "The Human Body in Symbolism" http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/sta/sta17.htm
Context: We men have one book in common which points to God. Each has it within himself, which is the priceless Name of God. Its letters are the flames of His love, which He out of His heart in the priceless Name of Jesus has revealed in us. Read these letters in your hearts and spirits and you have books enough. All the writings of the children of God direct you unto that one book, for therein lie all the treasures of wisdom. … This book is Christ in you.

Karl Barth photo

“The revelation of God, in which man's fulfilment of the true knowledge of God takes place, is the disposition of God in which He acts towards us as the same triune God that He is in Himself, and in such a way that, although we are men and not God, we receive a share in the truth of His knowledge of Himself. Certainly it is the share which He thinks proper and which is therefore suitable for us. But in this share we have the reality of the true knowledge of Himself.”

Karl Barth book Church Dogmatics

2:1
Church Dogmatics (1932–1968)

Karl Pearson photo

“That all science is description and not explanation, that the mystery of change in the inorganic world is just as great and just as omnipresent as in the organic world, are statements which will appear platitudes to the next generation.”

Karl Pearson book The Grammar of Science

Preface to the Second Edition
The Grammar of Science (1900)

Related topics