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After the collapse of socialism, capitalism remained without a rival. This unusual situation unleashed its greedy and - above all - its suicidal power. The belief is now that everything - and everyone - is fair game.

Gunter Grass

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Gunter Grass
Age: 87 †
Born: 1927
Born: October 16
Died: 2015
Died: April 13
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Author
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Graphic Artist
Illustrator
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Novelist
Painter
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Poet
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Danzig
Günter Wilhelm Grass
Günter Graß
Günter Wilhelm Graß
Games
Unusual
Everyone
Socialism
Unleashed
Power
Fairs
Rival
Everything
Fair
Suicidal
Without
Capitalism
Rivals
Game
Remained
Situation
Greedy
Belief
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More quotes by Gunter Grass

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Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped.
Gunter Grass
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Cemeteries have always had a lure for me. They are well kept, free from ambiguity, logical, virile, and alive. In cemeteries you can summon up courage and arrive at decisions, in cemeteries life takes on distinct contours -- I am not referring to the borders of the graves -- and if you will, a meaning.
Gunter Grass
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There must be reasons why we men are so hipped on breasts as if we'd all been weaned too soon.
Gunter Grass
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What can you say about a guy who lets himself be saddled with a baby when he's thirty-five and losing his hair? Love? Forget about that till you're past seventy, and by then the parts will have stopped working anyway.
Gunter Grass
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[To be an artist,] this desire to conquer all with images.
Gunter Grass
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I catch myself judging myself as that 13-year-old boy, who, of course, rightfully points out that he is only a child. And my membership - well, I was drafted into the Waffen-SS and didn't exactly volunteer, which was just as idiotic. I wanted to be on the submarines and then ended up with the Waffen-SS.
Gunter Grass
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What does a river like the Vistula carry away with it? Everything that goes to pieces: wood, glass, pencils, pacts ... chairs, bones, and sunsets too. What had long been forgotten rose to memory, floating on its back or stomach, with the help of the Vistula.
Gunter Grass
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An empty bus hurtles through the starry night Perhaps the driver is singing and happy because he sings.
Gunter Grass
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Today I know that all things are watching, that nothing goes unseen, that even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings. It's not God in his heaven who sees everything. A kitchen chair, a clothes hanger, a half-filled ashtray, or the wooden replica of a woman named Niobe can serve perfectly well as an unforgetting witness to our every deed.
Gunter Grass
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I had an uncle who was a postal official at the Polish post office in Gdansk. He was one of the defenders of the Polish postal service and, after it capitulated, was shot by the Germans under the provisions of martial law. Suddenly he was no longer a member of the family, and we were no longer allowed to play with his children.
Gunter Grass
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What makes books - and with them writers - so dangerous that church and state, politburos and the mass media feel the need to oppose them?
Gunter Grass
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Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.
Gunter Grass
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I have heard my fill of hurtful words. I think it's especially egregious when citizens like me, who point out abuses in their country, are referred to as 'do-gooders.' This is how a phrase that can be used to stop an argument dead becomes part of common usage.
Gunter Grass
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The human head is bigger than the globe. It conceives itself as containing more. It can think and rethink itself and ourselves from any desired point outside the gravitational pull of the earth. It starts by writing one thing and later reads itself as something else. The human head is monstrous.
Gunter Grass
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I don't believe in writing at night because it comes too easily. When I read it in the morning it's not good. I need daylight to begin. Between nine and ten o'clock I have a long breakfast with reading and music.
Gunter Grass
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[America is] the land where people find whatever they have lost.
Gunter Grass
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One of the mistakes the Germans made ... was that they were not brave enough to be afraid.
Gunter Grass
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Everything bigger than life attracts a crowd.
Gunter Grass
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I have often supported Israel, I have often visited the country and want the country to exist and at last find peace with its neighbours.
Gunter Grass
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If work and leisure are soon to be subordinated to this one utopian principle - absolute busyness - then utopia and melancholy will come to coincide: an age without conflict will dawn, perpetually busy - and without consciousness.
Gunter Grass