Helmut Jahn Quotes

When you're a kid, what you learn in school about being German has a sort of heaviness about it, and you have a sort of guilt with you.

For the first time, I am ashamed to be a German.

I feel like the people from Iceland have a different relationship with their country than other places. Most Icelandic people are really proud to be from there, and we don't have embarrassments like World War II where we were cruel to other people.

I'm Australian! How much more alpha can you get?

For my part, I do not believe that the country is in danger. I think England is safe in the race of men who inhabit her; that she is safe in something much more precious than her accumulated capital — her accumulated experience; she is safe in her national character, in her fame, in the traditions of a thousand years, and in that glorious future which I believe awaits her.

Your people invented guilt, but my people perfected it.

I am too conscious of being an American to accept public congratulation with good grace or to welcome it except as an occasion for expressing openly a shame which many Americans feel, day after day, helplessly and in silence.

One of the things that we're missing from our political dialogue right now is the idea that the United States is a home. It is more than an accounting sheet. It is more than the sum of its G.D.P., its total tax collections, or its total outlays. America is a family.

If Germany, my beloved fatherland, of whom you know I am proud, will not accept me, then must I, in the name of God, again make France or England richer by one capable German - and to the shame of the German nation.

Come t'e' picciol fallo amaro morso! Dante. What grievous pain a little fault doth give thee!

I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity.

England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.

When you are guilty, it is not your sins you hate but yourself.

I hope America manages to steer itself away from partisanship and back to patriotism; we are all Americans. And as long as I can make people laugh and feel better, I'm happy.

America is great, because America is good. And it really is up to all of us to make that true, now and in the future, and particularly for our children and our grandchildren.

The German people of today bear no guilt. Why are the German people not permitted the right to defend themselves? Why are the crimes of one group emphasized so greatly, instead of highlighting the great German cultural heritage? Why should the Germans not have the right to express their opinion freely?

My reluctant charity shames both me and the recipient.

I believe that it isn't victories but defeats that promote nationalism.

I believe that remorse is the least active of all a man's moral senses.

I have really sinned. I am going to pause now, and sit here on the mound repenting in deepest shame.

The wounds of conscience always leave a scar.

I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next.

If national pride is ever justifiable or excusable it is when it springs, not from power or riches, grandeur or glory, but from conviction of national innocence, information and benevolence.