Timothy Garton Ash > Quotes

“That said, the question remains: how to strike the balance between free speech and mutual respect in this mixed-up world, both blessed and cursed with instant communication? We should not fight fire with fire, threats with threats.”
― Timothy Garton Ash

“A cél pedig nem az, hogy mindenben egyetértsünk - ennek még a gondolatát is el kell vetni -, hanem az, hogy pontosan megegyezzünk abban, miképpen nem értünk egyet.”
― Timothy Garton Ash, Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World

“Ha nem tudjuk kifejezni gondolatainkat és érzéseinket, akkor emberi mivoltunkat sem tudjuk egészében megélni. Ha nem hallhatjuk és láthatjuk embertársaink érzéseit és gondolatait, akkor soha nem fogjuk megérteni, mit jelent másvalakinek lenni.”
― Timothy Garton Ash, Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World

“In this crowded world, we must learn to navigate by speech, as ancient mariners taught themselves to sail across the Aegean Sea.”
― Timothy Garton Ash, Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World

“Yet we might not be facing a climate emergency today if we had done what the Greens suggested nearly forty years ago. When in 2016 a conservative nationalist Polish foreign minister denounced a world of 'cyclists and vegetarians, who only want renewable energy' it was probably a 68er German schoolteacher he had in mind.”
― Timothy Garton Ash, Homelands: A Personal History of Europe

“Konrad Adenauer: ‘History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided.”
― Timothy Garton Ash, Homelands: A Personal History of Europe

“In Europe, zero is a recurring number.”
― Timothy Garton Ash, Homelands: A Personal History of Europe

“Our identities are given but also made. We can’t choose our parents, but we can choose who we become. ‘Basically I’m Chinese,’ Franz Kafka wrote in a postcard to his fiancée. If I say ‘basically I’m a central European’ I’m not literally claiming descent from the central European Yiddish writer Asch, but declaring an elective affinity.”
― Timothy Garton Ash, Homelands: A Personal History of Europe

“A művészek úgy aránylanak az emberi beszédhez, mint a felfedezők az utazáshoz.”
― Timothy Garton Ash, Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World

“Whenever there has been a secret police, not just in Germany, people often protest that their files are wholly unreliable, full of distortions and fabrications. How better to test that claim than to see what they had on me? After all, I should know what I was really up to. And what did my officers and informers think they were doing? Can the files, and the men and women behind them, tell us anything more about communism, the Cold War and the sense or nonsense of spying? This systematic opening of secret-police records to every citizen who is in them and wants to know, is without precedent. There has been nothing like it, anywhere, ever. Was it right? What has it done to those involved? The experience may even teach us something about history and memory, about ourselves, about human nature. So if the form of this book seems self-indulgent, the purpose is not. I am but a window, a sample, a means to an end, the object in this experiment.

To do this, I must explore not just a file but a life: the life of the person I was then. This is not the same things as 'my life.' What we usually call 'my life' is a constantly rewritten version of our own past. 'My life' is the mental autobiography with which and by which we all live. What really happened is quite another matter.

Searching for a lost self, I am also searching for a lost time. And for answers to the question How did the one shape the other? Historical time and personal time, the public and private, great events and our own lives. Writing about the large areas of human experience ignored by conventional political history, the historian Keith Thomas quotes Samuel Johnson:

How small, of all that human hearts endure
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.

But looking back I see how much the experience of my own heart, at least, was caused by our modern 'laws and kings': by the different regimes of East and West, and the conflict between them. Perhaps, after all, Johnson was expressing not a universal but a purely local truth. Happy the country where that was ever true.”
― Timothy Garton Ash, The File: A Personal History