• I am a part of all that I have met.  ~Alfred Lord Tennyson
• Even a clock that does not work is right twice a day.  ~Polish Proverb
• Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth.  ~Ludwig Börne
• Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.  ~Edward Albee
• By daily dying I have come to be.  ~Theodore Roethke
• If you think you're free, there's no escape possible.  ~Ram Dass
• The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.  ~G.C. Lichtenberg
• Each forward step we take we leave some phantom of ourselves behind.  ~John Lancaster Spalding
• No matter where you go or what you do, you live your entire life within the confines of your head.  ~Terry Josephson
• The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.  ~Bertrand Russell
• You cannot step into the same river twice.  ~Heraclitus, in Diogenes Laertius, Lives
• What deep wounds ever closed without a scar?  ~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Child Harold's Pilgrimage
• Seeking is not always the way to find.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
• It takes all the running you can do just to keep in the same place.  ~Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, 1872
• We waste a lot of time running after people we could have caught by just standing still.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
• You become responsible forever for what you've tamed.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 1943, translated from French by Richard Howard
• The scars you can't see are the hardest to heal.  ~Astrid Alauda
• Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness.  The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.  ~Eric Hoffer, Passionate State of Mind, 1955
• A thing, until it is everything, is noise, and once it is everything it is silence.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
• Admiration and familiarity are strangers.  ~George Sand
• No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.  ~Zen
• The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing.  ~Eric Berne
• The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.  ~Aldous Huxley
• If I am not pleased with myself, but should wish to be other than I am, why should I think highly of the influences which have made me what I am?  ~John Lancaster Spalding
• Before I travelled my road I was my road.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
• The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that the error and truth are simply opposite.  They are nothing of the sort.  What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.  ~H.L. Mencken
• When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.  ~John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1911
• You can't fall off the floor.  ~Author Unknown
• In general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it - the present, that is to say, must have become the past - before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future.  ~Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

Ludwig Borne

Börne verübelte Goethe weniger dessen literarische Übermacht als vielmehr seine politische Gleichgültigkeit: „Nie hat er ein armes Wörtchen für sein Volk gesprochen, er, der, früher auf der Höhe seines Ruhmes unantastbar, später im hohen Alter unverletzlich, hätte sagen dürfen, was kein anderer wagen durfte.“ Näher bei den Menschen war Börne, der seine Hand zur Reinigung ins Feuer halten wollte, sollte sie ihm ein König drücken. Im Gegensatz zu seinem zweiten großen Gegner Heine, der erklärte, „dass ich, wenn mir das Volk die Hand gedrückt, sie nachher waschen werde“.

Näher bei den Menschen - ein schöner Twist zum Claim des Deutschland-Dialogs der SPD und deren Tourleiter Kurt Beck. Doch der SPD-Vorsitzende war in Schmidts Rede (die teilweise wie eine XXL-version eines Stand-Ups in früheren Late-Night-Zeiten wirkt) in prominenter Gesellschaft - auch Charlotte Roche und Heidi Klum fanden Erwähung, dank gelenkiger Rhetorik auch Joschka Fischer und sogar Bret Easton Ellis. Wie das nun alles zusammenpasst, wäre durch eine tiefenscharfe Vollinterpretation zu klären.

Winfried Menninghaus, übernehmen Sie!