“No, no, no. This was the system. Wirth had invented it. It worked. And because it worked, it was irreversible.”

—  Franz Stangl

When asked if he could have gone against his orders. Quoted in "The Healing Wound: Experiences and Reflections on Germany" - Page 125 - by Gitta Sereny - History - 2001.

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 "No, no, no. This was the system. Wirth had invented it. It worked. And because it worked, it was irreversible." by Franz Stangl?
Franz Stangl photo
Franz Stangl 6
Austrian-born SS officer, commandant at first Sobibór exter… 1908–1971

Related quotes

Robert Sheckley photo

“Charlie Gleister had invented a time machine, but he hadn’t invented it right because it didn’t work.”

Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) American writer

Slaves of Time (p. 11)
Short fiction, The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”

John Gall (1925–2014) American physician

Source: General systemantics, an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail..., 1975, p. 65, cited in: Grady Booch (1991) Object oriented design with applications. p. 11

Isaac D'Israeli photo

“Theories of genius are the peculiar constructions of our own philosophical times; ages of genius had passed away, and they left no other record than their works; no preconcerted theory described the workings of the imagination to be without imagination, nor did they venture to teach how to invent invention.”

Isaac D'Israeli (1766–1848) British writer

Source: The Literary Character, Illustrated by the History of Men of Genius (1795–1822), Ch. IV.

Ai Weiwei photo

“I want to prove that the system is not working..... You can’t simply say that the system is not working. You have to work through it”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

Osnos, Evan. “ It’s Not Beautiful: An Artist Takes On the System http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/05/24/100524fa_fact_osnos?currentPage=all.” New Yorker, May 24, 2010, 54–63.
2010-, 2010

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”

John Gall (1925–2014) American physician

Source: General systemantics, an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail..., 1975, p. 71. This statement is known as Gall's law

Lawrence Lessig photo

“The legal system doesn't work. Or more accurately, it doesn't work for anyone except those with the most resources. Not because the system is corrupt. I don't think our legal system (at the federal level, at least) is at all corrupt. I mean simply because the costs of our legal system are so astonishingly high that justice can practically never be done.”

Lawrence Lessig book Free Culture

Free Culture (2004)

Friedrich Engels photo

“By dissolving nationalities, the liberal economic system had done its best to universalise enmity, to transform mankind into a horde of ravenous beasts (for what else are competitors?) who devour one another just because each has identical interests with all the others – after this preparatory[work there remained but one step to take before the goal was reached, the dissolution of the family. To accomplish this, economy’s own beautiful invention, the factory system, came to its aid.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

Nachdem die liberale Ökonomie ihr Bestes getan hatte, um durch die Auflösung der Nationalitäten die Feindschaft zu verallgemeinern, die Menschheit in eine Horde reißender Tiere - und was sind Konkurrenten anders?
zu verwandeln, die einander ebendeshalb auffressen, WEIL jeder mit allen andern gleiches Interesse hat, nach dieser Vorarbeit blieb ihr nur noch ein Schritt zum Ziele übrig, die Auflösung der Familie. Um diese durchzusetzen, kam ihr eine eigene schöne Erfindung, das Fabriksystem, zu Hülfe.
Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (1844)

Edwin Howard Armstrong photo

“Anyone who has had actual contact with the making of the inventions that built the radio art knows that these inventions have been the product of experiment and work based on physical reasoning, rather than on the mathematicians' calculations and formulae.”

Edwin Howard Armstrong (1890–1954) American electrical engineer and inventor

As quoted in Electronics (2005) by P. Arun, p. 310
Context: Anyone who has had actual contact with the making of the inventions that built the radio art knows that these inventions have been the product of experiment and work based on physical reasoning, rather than on the mathematicians' calculations and formulae. Precisely the opposite impression is obtained from many of our present day text books and publications.

P. W. Botha photo

“The fact is that the Westminster system has not worked anywhere in Africa – not even in England because the Scots and Welsh are moving away from it.”

P. W. Botha (1916–2006) South African prime minister

As Minister of Defence, Port Elizabeth NP Congress, 20 September 1976, as cited in PW Botha in his own words, Pieter-Dirk Uys, 1987, p. 49

Eugene V. Debs photo

“We live in the capitalist system, so-called because its dominated b the capitalist class. In this system the capitalists are the rulers and the workers the subjects. The capitalists are in a decided minority and yet they rule because of the ignorance of the working class.”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

Working Class Politics (1910)

Related topics