Thomas Mann Quotes (117 Quotes)

Opinions cannot survive if no one has a chance to fight for them.

I never can understand how anyone can not smoke it deprives a man of the best part of life. With a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him, literally.

Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.

I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I've had.

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.

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

He has been reluctant to share information with anyone, particularly the Congress and considers himself basically not bound by what others would see as normal requirements of transparency.

What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back as it is grief at not being able to want to do so

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.

For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.

Time cools, time clarifies no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours

Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word

I would say Joe Lieberman (would be perceived as being the most pro-business), ... is the least likely of the major candidates to win the nomination.

Extraordinary creature So close a friend, and yet so remote.

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own.

I'm skeptical about efforts to garner historical assessments from the broad public, given low levels of public information and attention to these matters. Better to start and stop with scholarly judgments.