Famous quotes by Thomas Mann:
"People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives"
"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
"Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject."
"Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous- to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd."
"Speech is civilization itself. The word... preserves contact / it is silence which isolates."
"It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death."
"A man's dying is more his survivor's affair than his own"
"For to be poised against fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully, is more than simple endurance; it is an act of aggression, a positive triumph."
"War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace."
"It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive."
"Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist."
"Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent."