Quotes By Friedrich Durrenmatt

A story has been thought through to the end when it has taken the worst possible turn.

The rightful claim to dissent is an existential right of the individual.

Human life is beyond comprehension.

Who sows fear, reaps weapons.

Truth is always a delusion.

Our science has become terrible, our research dangerous, our findings deadly. We physicists have to make peace with reality. Reality is not as strong as we are. We will ruin reality.

Everything that is necessary is also easy. You just have to accept it. And the most necessary, the most natural matter on this planet is death.

For people who have no critical acumen, a state is a mythical entity, for those who think critically it is a rational fiction, created by man in order to facilitate human coexistence.

One does not set fire to a world which is already lost.

Before anything else, we need a new age of Enlightenment. Our present political systems must relinquish their claims on truth, justice and freedom and have to replace them with the search for truth, justice, freedom and reason.

Without tolerance, our world turns into hell.

For a person who is dying only eternity counts.

Communism is a proposition to structure the world more reasonably, a proposition for changing the world. As such, we have to analyze it and, if we deem it reasonable, act upon it.

There are thoughts we must not think.

A major power can afford a military debacle only when it looks like a political victory.

News reports don't change the world. Only facts change it, and those have already happened when we get the news.

A story is not finished, until it took the worst turn.

There are risks which are not acceptable: the destruction of humanity is one of them.

The freedom of each individual can only be the freedom of all.

You can't take back an act you were able to think.

I am a man, and God is hiding from us humans. We are unable to see Him, we can only search for Him.

In a society which is structured the wrong way, piety has no effect.

It is surely easier to confess a murder over a cup of coffee than in front of a jury.

When death has you by the throat, you don't mince words.

The problems of all of humanity can only be solved by all of humanity.

The art of the cuisine, when fully mastered, is the one human capability of which only good things can be said.

The world is bad but not without hope. It is only hopeless when you look at it from an ideal viewpoint.

Man is imperfect. The reality he creates is always endangered by man.

It is easy to kill when you don't see your victim.

Today's Communism can survive only if it abandons the myth of an infallible party, if it continues to think, and if it becomes democratic.