Thomas Spry

“After the Wall fell the German media called East Germany ‘the most perfected surveillance state of all time’. At the end, the Stasi had 97,000 employees—more than enough to oversee a country of seventeen million people. But it also had over 173,000 informers among the population. In Hitler’s Third Reich it is estimated that there was one Gestapo agent for every 2000 citizens, and in Stalin’s USSR there was one KGB agent for every 5830 people. In the GDR, there was one Stasi officer or informant for every sixty-three people.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“Many people withdrew into what they called ‘internal emigration’. They sheltered their secret inner lives in an attempt to keep something of themselves from the authorities.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“But whoever considers the fundamental impulses of man with a view to determining how far they may have here acted as INSPIRING GENII (or as demons and cobolds), will find that they have all practiced philosophy at one time or another, and that each one of them would have been only too glad to look upon itself as the ultimate end of existence and the legitimate LORD over all the other impulses.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL - Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future: The Critique of the Traditional Morality and the Philosophy of the Past

“Lately, a study has suggested that depressed people have a more accurate view of reality, though this accuracy is not worth a bean because it is depressing, and depressed people live shorter lives. Optimists and believers are happier and healthier in their unreal worlds.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall