Quote Bank

Question 1

Aim of war

Answer 1

“The primary aim of modern warfare is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.”

Question 2

Controlled insanity

Answer 2

“If the High are to keep their places permanently then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.”

Question 3

Aim of the party

Answer 3

The aim of the party is for “human equality to be for ever averted.”

Question 4

Death = freedom

Answer 4

“To die hating them, that was freedom.”

Question 5

Tv channel

Answer 5

“The black channel”

Question 6

Sm

Answer 6

“Smeared”

Question 7

Identity card

Answer 7

“The demonstrators, in shock, obediently pulled their cards from their wallets.”

Question 8

Fake story

Answer 8

“‘You people want an underground escape organization? Well, I’ll give you one then.’ Fleischer had won.”

Question 9

Why does the party seek power

Answer 9

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. The object of power is power.”

Question 10

Inside forever

Answer 10

“‘They can’t get inside you,’ she had said. But they could get inside you. ‘What happens to you here is forever,’”

Question 11

Funder’s hate

Answer 11

Herr Bock. “Here he is once more getting the trust of his people and selling them cheap.”

Question 12

Indifference

Answer 12

“When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you did or refrained from doing, made no difference. Whatever happened you vanished”

Question 13

Crimestop

Answer 13

“Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.”

Question 14

Selfishness

Answer 14

“You want it to happen to the other person. You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.”

Question 15

Victory of love

Answer 15

“He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

Question 16

Paperweight

Answer 16

“The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the fragment of coral but the interior of the glass itself.”

Question 17

Surveillance state

Answer 17

“The German media called East Germany ‘the most perfected surveillance state of all time’.”

Question 18

Yellow

Answer 18

“There’s order everywhere else in German life even the handicapped are labeled with yellow (yellow!) armbands.”

Question 19

Inconstancy

Answer 19

“The Stasi subjected him to disciplinary proceedings on account of ‘inconstancy’, and in their files attributed the remarriage to ‘the repeated negative influence of Frau Koch’.”

Question 20

Party slogans

Answer 20

“War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength.”

Question 21

Ultimate subtlety

Answer 21

“That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.”

Question 22

Palimpsest,

Answer 22

“All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.”

Question 23

2+2=5

Answer 23

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. And what was terrifying was that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four?”

Question 24

Huge force

Answer 24

“It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you persuading you to deny the evidence of your senses.”

Question 25

Travelled

Answer 25

“‘Have you travelled yourself since the Wall came down?’ She throws her head back. ‘Not yet.’”

Question 26

Strangulation

Answer 26

“I could see his neck—they’d forgotten to cover it up. There were no strangulation marks, nothing.”

Question 27

Socialist beauty

Answer 27

“Each time I ask [Herr Winz] about the reality of life in the GDR he returns to the beauties of socialist theory.”

Question 28

Repressed episode

Answer 28

“‘I think I’d totally repressed that entire episode,’”

Question 29

Success propaganda

Answer 29

“When we started to get tied up in this ridiculous GDR success propaganda—exaggerated harvest results and so on—I withdrew from that altogether”

Question 30

Rape

Answer 30

“It meant that before the good things about the west got to us, this negative thing—the letting loose of the criminals—affected me.”

Question 31

Reunification of Germany

Answer 31

The reunification of Germany is often celebrated as the beginning of a “glorious new era in German history,”

Question 32

Reclaim the night

Answer 32

“We went on a ‘Reclaim the Night’ march recently, something that made me feel real positive, and far away from Thüringen and everything that happened here.”

Question 33

Reconstruction of files

Answer 33

“He is telling me, in his quiet way, that the resources united Germany is throwing at this part of reconstructing the lives of its former East German citizens are pitiful, some kind of Sisyphean joke.”

Question 34

Sexual desire is

Answer 34

Sexual desire is “the force that would tear the Party to pieces.”

Question 35

Pure love

Answer 35

“But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred.”

Question 36

Political act

Answer 36

“Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.”

Question 37

Turned to account

Answer 37

“The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account.”

Question 38

Called bluff

Answer 38

“Julia doesn’t know why the Stasi was afraid of them complaining to Honecker. It is one of the very rare occasions when the bluff was called and someone ‘won’ against the Firm.”

Question 39

Plate quote

Answer 39

“All the courage I had is in that plate. The whole shitty little skerrick of it. That’s all I had.”

Question 40

Paul’s guilt

Answer 40

“She may have overestimated her own strength and now she is a lonely, teary guilt-wracked wreck.”

Question 41

Proles hope

Answer 41

“If there was hope, it lay in the proles! It would be a world of sanity.”

Question 42

Charlie’s poem

Answer 42

"I have been sown
Only my head sticks
Defiant, out of the earth
But one day it too will be mown
Making me, finally
Of this land."

Question 43

Decisive act

Answer 43

“To mark the paper was the decisive act.”

Question 44

Nothingness

Answer 44

“Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness.”

Question 45

Buckle

Answer 45

“Buckle souls out of shape forever”

Question 46

Embarrassing

Answer 46

“The whole Stasi thing. It’s sort of embarrassing.”

Question 47

Stasi hq

Answer 47

“The Stasi men would never in their lives have imagined that they would cease to exist and that their offices would be a museum.”

Question 48

Telescreen

Answer 48

Big brother is watching you

Question 49

Chocolate

Answer 49

“There would be no reduction of the chocolate ration.

Question 50

Parsons obedience

Answer 50

It was my little daughter. He said with a sort of doleful pride.

Question 51

Beetles

Answer 51

“Were told that enemy plane sprayed potato beetles over East German crops.”