“There was once a community of scoundrels, that is to say, they were not scoundrels, but ordinary people.”

— Franz Kafka, book The Blue Octavo Notebooks

The Blue Octavo Notebooks (1954)

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 "There was once a community of scoundrels, that is to say, they were not scoundrels, but ordinary people." by Franz Kafka?

Franz Kafka266

author 1883–1924

Related quotes

“I have always thought respectable people scoundrels, and I look anxiously at my face every morning for signs of my becoming a scoundrel.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Quoted in Alan Wood Bertrand Russell: The Passionate Skeptic: A Biography, Vol. 2 (1958), p. 233
1950s

“I'd wish the government took honest people into consideration, it shows enough consideration for scoundrels.”

Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872) austrian dramatic and writer

On the Admissibility of Capital Punishment, from Notebooks and Diaries (1836).

“We handed the most important belongings of our people -- the railroads and the banks -- to aliens who 2000 years ago had turned the temple into a house of usury. Back then there was a man who had the bravery to drive out these scoundrels with a whip! If today a national socialist is seen with such a temple-whip, he's thrown into jail.”

Julius Streicher (1885–1946) German politician

Wir haben unsere wichtigsten Volksgüter, die Eisenbahnen und die Banken, den Fremdlingen überlassen, die schon vor 2000 Jahren den Tempel zu einem Wucherhaus gemacht haben. Damals hatte schon einer den Mut besessen, mit einer Peitsche dieses Gesindel auszutreiben! Wenn heute ein Nationalsozialist mit einer solchen Tempelpeitsche angetroffen wird, wird er ins Gefängnis geworfen.
05/01/1925, speech in the Bavarian regional parliament; debate about the budget of the ministry of justice ("Kampf dem Weltfeind", Stürmer publishing house, Nuremberg, 1938)

“To demonize all Soviet "leaders" at all levels, to portray them as unqualified villains and evildoers, unprincipled self-seeking scoundrels who were indifferent to the interests and needs of the people — that is a shallow and frivolous approach. Of course there were villains, quite a few of them. But most of those who came to power had the intention of serving the "toiling masses" from which they themselves had come. That the system rendered their aspirations useless, reduced their efforts to nothing, and ultimately snuffed out their finer impulses — that is a separate question.”

Mikhail Gorbachev (1931) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

1990s, On My Country and the World (1999)

“Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.”

Borís Pasternak (1890–1960) Russian writer

“It is not good for ordinary people to say, "I am He."”

Ramakrishna (1836–1886) Indian mystic and religious preacher

The waves belong to the water. Does the water belong to the waves?
The upshot of the whole thing is that, no matter what path you follow, yoga is impossible unless the mind becomes quiet. The mind of a yogi is under his control; he is not under the control of his mind.
Source: The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (1942), p. 248