Martin Svoboda

Statement of 2006, partly cited in Stop Making Sense: Music from the Perspective of the Real (2015) by Scott Wilson, p. 117
2000s
Contesto: You don't have to be a mathematician to have a feel for numbers. A movie, by the way, was made — sort of a small-scale offbeat movie — called Pi recently. I think it starts off with a big string of digits running across the screen, and then there are people who get concerned with various things, and in the end this Bible code idea comes up. And that ties in with numbers, so the relation to numbers is not necessarily scientific, and even when I was mentally disturbed, I had a lot of interest in numbers.

Origine: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 4
Contesto: Writing well was almost the same as thinking well, and thinking well was the next thing to acting well. All moral discipline, all moral perfection derived from the soul of literature, from the soul of human dignity, which was the moving spirit of both humanity and politics. Yes, they were all one, one and the same force, one and the same idea, and all of them could be comprehended in one single word... The word was — civilization!

Reflections of a Non-Political Man [Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen] (1918)
Contesto: The important thing for me, then, is not the "work," but my life. Life is not the means for the achievement of an esthetic ideal of perfection; on the contrary, the work is an ethical symbol of life.

Origine: The Beloved Returns (1939), Ch. 7
Contesto: Hold fast the time! Guard it, watch over it, every hour, every minute! Unregarded it slips away, like a lizard, smooth, slippery, faithless, a pixy wife. Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each its true and due fulfillment.

As quoted in The New York Times (18 June 1950); also in Thomas Mann: A Critical Study (1971) by R. J. Hollingdale, Ch. 2

Aber das ist wohl so, weil ein einzelner immer der Tod ist — und zwei Millionen immer nur eine Statistik.
Der schwarze Obelisk (1956)
A variant of this quote "One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is just a statistic." has also been attributed to Joseph Stalin, but no source for this has been found. This version appeared in the English press not later than 1958. (Ремарк, Эрих Мария // Словарь современных цитат / составитель К. В. Душенко — Москва: изд-во «Эксмо», 2006)

Origine: Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

Origine: Three Comrades

Origine: The Black Obelisk

Origine: Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country