Berthold Auerbach Quotes
Imagination is the mightiest despot.
Auerbach, Berthold. On the Heights. Translated by F. E. Bunnett, Roberts Brothers, 1868.
McClellan thought President Lincoln an oaf and toyed with the idea of taking over. Ironically, he was a terrible battle general and never would have any reasonable success on the battlefield.
At the time of this statement most people thought that Bush was joking. But by the end of his Presidency many looked back on the quote and thought that Bush had such preferences. He unilaterally took the country into the Iraq War and assumed Presidential Powers that no other president had ever attempted. Most serious, his administration actually took the formal legal position that the President did not have to obey the law if he unilaterally thought that it was not in the nation’s interest from the point of view of the Commander in Chief. So many debate whether this quotation was a light hearted joke of a harbinger of his real feelings about the Presidency.
Berthold Auerbach was a German-Jewish poet and author. He was the founder of the German "tendency novel", in which fiction is used as a means of influencing public opinion on social, political, moral, and religious questions.
