Quote #21
Politics has been called the 'art of the possible,' and it actually is a realm akin to art insofar as, like art, it occupies a creatively mediating position between spirit and life, the idea and reality.
More from Thomas Mann
- A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
- Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.
- An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names,…
- Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
- What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.
- It is not good when people no longer believe in war. Pretty soon they no longer believe in many other things which they absolutely must bel…
- It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, f…
- It often happens that an old family, with traditions that are entirely practical, sober and bourgeois, undergoes in its declining days a ki…