Franz Rosenzweig Quotes

"The peoples of the world foresee a time when their land with its rivers and mountains still lies under heaven as it does today, but other people dwell there; when their language is entombed in books, and their laws and customs have lost their living power."

"War as it was known to the peoples of antiquity was in general only one of the natural expressions of life, and presented no fundamental complications. War meant that a people staked its life, for the sake of its life. A people that marched to war took upon itself the danger of its own death. That mattered little as long as the peoples regarded themselves as mortal."

"[Unlike the Jews] the peoples of the earth cannot be satisfied by the affinity of blood; they drive their roots into the night of the earth, itself dead but also life-giving, and take from the permanence of the earth their own permanence."

"Their will towards eternity clings to the earth and its dominion, to territory. The blood of their sons flows upon the soil of their homeland; for they do not trust to the living community of blood-relation, were it not anchored in the steady ground of the earth. The earth nourishes, but it also binds, and where a people loves the soil of its homeland more than its own life, it remains subject to the danger - and this danger hangs over every people of the world - that even if that love saves the soil of the homeland from the enemy nine times, and with the soil also saves the life of the people, nonetheless the 10th time the soil will be more loved than life, and the life of the people will be spilled out upon it."