1900s, Address at the Prize Day Exercises at Groton School (1904)
Context: Of course, the worst of all lives is the vicious life; the life of a man who becomes a positive addition to the forces of evil in a community. Next to that and when I am speaking to people who, by birth and training and standing, ought to amount to a great deal, I have a right to say only second to it in criminality comes the life of mere vapid ease, the ignoble life of a man who desires nothing from his years but that they shall be led with the least effort, the least trouble, the greatest amount of physical enjoyment or intellectual enjoyment of a mere dilettante type. The life that is worth living, and the only life that is worth living, is the life of effort, the life of effort to attain what is worth striving for.
“By a common effort, we will soon succeed in tranforming Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Sachsen-Anhalt, Brandenburg, Sachsen and Thüringen into blossoming landscapes, where it is worth to live and work.”
Durch eine gemeinsame Anstrengung wird es uns gelingen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern und Sachsen-Anhalt, Brandenburg, Sachsen und Thüringen schon bald wieder in blühende Landschaften zu verwandeln, in denen es sich zu leben und zu arbeiten lohnt.
In a television speech about East Germany after the Reunification. (June 1990)
Original
Durch eine gemeinsame Anstrengung wird es uns gelingen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Sachsen-Anhalt, Brandenburg, Sachsen und Thüringen schon bald wieder in blühende Landschaften zu verwandeln, in denen es sich zu leben und zu arbeiten lohnt.
Fernsehansprache zur Währungsunion zwischen BRD und DDR am 1. Juli 1990; Das Erste, 20:15 Uhr (im Anschluss an die Tagesschau); Video auf tagesschau.de http://www.tagesschau.de/multimedia/video/video728920.html
Variant: Durch eine gemeinsame Anstrengung wird es uns gelingen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern und Sachsen-Anhalt, Brandenburg, Sachsen und Thüringen schon bald wieder in blühende Landschaften zu verwandeln, in denen es sich zu leben und zu arbeiten lohnt.
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Helmut Kohl 19
former chancellor of West Germany (1982-1990) and then the … 1930–2017Related quotes
“Where the works gives scope for individuality, one sees a blossoming of self respect”
Sketchbook 1946-1949
“If we do not live where we work and when we work we are wasting our lives and our work too.”
Source: The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
The Influence of Literature upon Society (1800), Pt. 2, ch. 5
VII, 53
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book VII
Context: Where any work can be done conformably to the reason which is common to gods and men, there we have nothing to fear; for where we are able to get profit by means of the activity which is successful and proceeds according to our constitution, there no harm is to be suspected.