Quotes from Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age

“Early on, to arouse a sense of belonging, of “community,” the party began to emphasize the importance, above everything else, of ritual and propaganda—the flags, the insignia, the uniforms, the pageantry, the standard greetings, the declarations of loyalty, and the endless repetition of slogans. Nazism was a cult. The appeal was strictly to emotion.”
― Modris Eksteins, quote from Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age

“The beautiful lie is, however, also the essence of kitsch. Kitsch is a form of make-believe, a form of deception. It is an alternative to a daily reality that would otherwise be a spiritual vacuum. . . . Kitsch replaces ethics with aesthetics. . . . Nazism was the ultimate expression of kitsch, of its mind-numbing, death-dealing portent. Nazism, like kitsch, masqueraded as life; the reality of both was death. The Third Reich was the creation of “kitsch men,” people who confused the relationship between life and art, reality and myth, and who regarded the goal of existence as mere affirmation, devoid of criticism, difficulty, insight.”
― Modris Eksteins, quote from Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age

“Myth took the place of objectively conceived history. Myth, Michel Tournier has said, is “history everyone already knows.”2 As such, history becomes nothing but a tool of the present, with no integrity whatsoever of its own.”
― Modris Eksteins, quote from Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age

“It was Hitler’s style, his oratorical talents and his remarkable ability to transmit emotions and feelings in his speeches, that took him to the leadership of the ragtag party of misfits and adventurers that he joined in Munich in 1919 and that called itself the German Workers’ Party. The ideas he and the party spouted were all tattered; they were nothing but jargon inherited from the paranoid Austro-German border politics of the pre-1914 era, which saw “Germanness” threatened with inundation by “subject nationalities.” Even the combination “national socialist,” which Hitler added to the party’s name when he became leader in 1920, was borrowed from the same era and same sources. It was not the substance—there was no substance to the frantic neurotic tirades—that allowed the party to survive and later to grow. It was the style and the mood. It was above all the theater, the vulgar “art,” the grand guignol productions of the beer halls and the street.”
― Modris Eksteins, quote from Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age

“Nazi kitsch may bear a blood relationship to the highbrow religion of art proclaimed by many moderns.”
― Modris Eksteins, quote from Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age

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Popular quotes

“No,” Abigail said in a low voice, “but I can save one.”
― Damian Wampler, quote from Sevara: Dawn of Hope

“Then the carpenters return to making more tables—tables on which to spread our pottery, a drawing-table for Mac, a table off which to dine, a table for my typewriter. ...

Mac draws out a towel-horse and the carpenters start upon it. The old man brings it proudly to my room on completion. It looks different from Mac's drawing, and when the carpenter sets it down I see why. It has colossal feet, great curved scrolls of feet. They stick out so that, wherever you put it, you invariable trip over them.

Ask him, I say to Max, why he has made these feet instead of sticking to the design he was given?

The old man looks at us with dignity.

"I made them this way," he says, "so that they should be beautiful. I wanted this that I have made to be a thing of beauty!"

To this cry of the artist there could be no response. I bow my head, and resign myself to tripping up over those hideous feet for the rest of the season!”
― quote from Come, Tell Me How You Live

“We choose this. This place. This life. What it will be, and how we live it. We are not slaves to gods, or fate, or destinies woven in veils of smoke. We choose the people we want to be, and we choose the shape of the world in which we live. Nothing worthwhile comes without sacrifice. There is nothing so easy as swimming with the current, nothing so difficult as being the first to stand up. To say no. To point at a thing wrong and name it so. There are none so brave as those who choose to stand, when all others are content to kneel. None so worthy of the title 'hero' as those who fight when there are none to see it. Who choose a life bereft of accolade or fanfare, a life of struggle for the idea that we are all the same. Every one of us. And every one of us has the right to be happy. To know peace. To know love.”
― Jay Kristoff, quote from Endsinger

“The author squares man's depravity with still being made in the image of God with this word picture. A vase that has held beautiful roses though now broken, will nevertheless hold something of the fragrance it once contained.”
― A.W. Tozer, quote from The Attributes of God: A Journey Into the Father's Heart

“Polislerin canı cehenneme.güvenimize ihanet ediyorsunuz!
elini bir çocuğun pantolonuna sokan rahiplerin canı cehenneme.
onları koruyan, bizi kötülüğe yönelten kiliselerin canı cehenneme.
konu açılmışken, İsa'nın da canı cehenneme. paçayı ucuz kurtardı.
çarmıhta bir gün, cehennemde hafta sonu boyunca kaldı ve meleklerin ilahileri sonsuza dek onun için söylenecek.
Otisville' de yedi yıl yaşamayı denesene İsa!”
― David Benioff, quote from The 25th Hour

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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