“If Europe has had a supreme invented tradition, that of the Germans before Germany is it-so much so that most people who speak about it do not realize that they are dealing with fiction.”

Source: Quotaes, Barbarian Tides (2010), p. 43

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 "If Europe has had a supreme invented tradition, that of the Germans before Germany is it-so much so that most people wh…" by Walter Goffart?
Walter Goffart photo
Walter Goffart 11
American historian 1934

Related quotes

Alfred Rosenberg photo
Moses Hess photo

“We Germans are the most universal, the most European people of Europe.”

Moses Hess (1812–1875) German philosopher

Ibid
Die europäische Triarchie (The European Triarchy)

China Miéville photo
Mandell Creighton photo

“No people do so much harm as those who go about doing good.”

Mandell Creighton (1843–1901) English historian and ecclesiastic

Quoted by Louise Creighton in Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, vol. 2 http://books.google.com/books?id=XFrIeWud0_wC&q=%22no+people+do+so+much+harm+as+those+who+go+about+doing+good%22&pg=PA501#v=onepage. (1905)

James Burke (science historian) photo

“Never before have so many people understood so little about so much.”

James Burke (science historian) (1936) British broadcaster, science historian, author, and television producer

Connections (1979), 10 - Yesterday, Tomorrow and You

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn photo
Winston S. Churchill photo

“New discord has arisen in Europe of late years from the fact that Germany is not satisfied with the result of the late War. I have indicated several times that Germany got off lightly after the Great War. I know that that is not always a fashionable opinion, but the facts repudiate the idea that a Carthaginian peace was in fact imposed upon Germany. No division was made of the great masses of the German people. No portion of Germany inhabited by Germans was detached, except where there was the difficulty of disentangling the population of the Silesian border. No attempt was made to divide Germany as between the northern and southern portions which might well have tempted the conquerors at that time. No State was carved out of Germany. She underwent no serious territorial loss, except the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, which she herself had seized only 50 years before. The great mass of the Germans remained united after all that Europe had passed through, and they are more vehemently united to-day than ever before. You may talk of the War indemnity; what has happened there? I suppose that the Germans paid, in round terms, £1,000,000,000. But they had borrowed £2,000,000,000 at the same time, and there are no signs of their paying back.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1933/apr/13/adjournment-easter-1#column_2790 in the House of Commons (13 April 1933)
The 1930s

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg photo
Rajneesh photo

“It was good of Friedrich Nietzsche to declare God dead — I declare that he has never been born. It is a created fiction, an invention, not a discovery. Do you understand the difference between invention and discovery? A discovery is about truth, an invention is manufactured by you. It is man-manufactured fiction.”

Rajneesh (1931–1990) Godman and leader of the Rajneesh movement

God is Dead, Now Zen is the Only Living Truth (1989) YouTube video of the lecture http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBEIeRSLb8k
Context: It was good of Friedrich Nietzsche to declare God dead — I declare that he has never been born. It is a created fiction, an invention, not a discovery. Do you understand the difference between invention and discovery? A discovery is about truth, an invention is manufactured by you. It is man-manufactured fiction. Certainly it has given consolation, but consolation is not the right thing! Consolation is opium. It keeps you unaware of the reality, and life is flowing past you so quickly — seventy years will be gone soon. Anybody who gives you a belief system is your enemy, because the belief system becomes the barrier for your eyes, you cannot see the truth. The very desire to find the truth disappears. But in the beginning it is bitter if all your belief systems are taken away from you. The fear and anxiety which you have been suppressing for millennia, which is there, very alive, will surface immediately. No God can destroy it, only the search for truth and the experience of truth — not a belief — is capable of healing all your wounds, of making you a whole being. And the whole person is the holy person to me.

Related topics