Helmut Schmidt

In the basic questions, one have to be naive. And I think that the problems of the world and of humanity cannot be solved without idealism. However, I also believe that one should be realistic and pragmatic at the same time.

Weggefährten - Erinnerungen und Reflexionen, Siedler-Verlag Berlin 1996, S. 54, , , 1996

Did it have to come to this? The paradox is that when Europe was less united, it was in many ways more independent. The leaders who ruled in the early stages of integration had all been formed in a world before the global hegemony of the United States, when the major European states were themselves imperial powers, whose foreign policies were self-determined. These were people who had lived through the disasters of the Second World War, but were not crushed by them. This was true not just of a figure like De Gaulle, but of Adenauer and Mollet, of Eden and Heath, all of whom were quite prepared to ignore or defy America if their ambitions demanded it. Monnet, who did not accept their national assumptions, and never clashed with the US, still shared their sense of a future in which Europeans could settle their own affairs, in another fashion. Down into the 1970s, something of this spirit lived on even in Giscard and Schmidt, as Carter discovered. But with the neo-liberal turn of the 1980s, and the arrival in power in the 1990s of a postwar generation, it faded. The new economic doctrines cast doubt on the state as a political agent, and the new leaders had never known anything except the Pax Americana. The traditional springs of autonomy were gone.

Perry Anderson, "Depicting Europe", London Review of Books (20 September 2007) , 2007

I think that the idea that a modern society would be able to establish itself as a multicultural society, with as many cultural groups as possible is absurd. One cannot make out of Germany with at least a thousand years of history since Otto I subsequently make a crucible.

Frankfurter Rundschau, 12. September 1992, S. 8, zitiert in konservativ.de und linksnet.de , 1992

The more direct decisions by all the people, all the more ungovernable is the country!

Handeln für Deutschland: Wege aus der Krise, Rowohlt, 1993, p. 136, , , 1993

Helmut Schmidt continues to speak of a sense of duty, predictability, feasibility, firmness [...] These are secondary virtues. Simply put precise:.. So you can also run a concentration camp with them.

Oskar Lafontaine on 15. July 1982 in STERN to the discussion about the NATO Double-Track Decision (here: shortend citation of BILD) , 1982