Teutons Quotes

“...Turn our thoughts, in the next place, to the characters of learned men. The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning. Read over again all the accounts we have of Hindoos, Chaldeans, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, Teutons, we shall find that priests had all the knowledge, and really governed all mankind. Examine Mahometanism, trace Christianity from its first promulgation; knowledge has been almost exclusively confined to the clergy. And, even since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate a free inquiry? The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your legs and hands, and fly into your face and eyes.

[Letters to John Taylor, 1814, XVIII, p. 484]”
― John Adams, The Letters of John and Abigail Adams

“The English language is the tongue now current in England and her colonies throughout the world and also throughout the greater part of the United States of America. It sprang from the German tongue spoken by the Teutons, who came over to Britain after the conquest of that country by the Romans. These Teutons comprised Angles, Saxons, Jutes and several other tribes from the northern part of Germany. They spoke different dialects, but these became blended in the new country, and the composite tongue came to be known as the Anglo-Saxon which has been the main basis for the language as at present constituted and is still the prevailing element.”
― Joseph Devlin, How To Speak And Write Correctly

“Englishmen and Germans are blood brothers, descended from the same stern Woden-worshiping ancestors, blessed with the same rugged virtues, and fired with the same noble ambitions. In a world of diverse and hostile races the joint mission of these virile men is one of union and cooperation with their fellow Teutons in defense of civilization against the onslaughts of all others. There is work to be done by the Teuton. As a unit he must in times to come crush successively the rising power of Slav and Mongolian, preserving for Europe and America the glorious culture that he has evolved.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“We are repelled by the Teutons, because their thoughts will not minister to our
private needs; but this instinctive recoil at the same time explains a furtive
attraction which was not exhausted by the romantic revival of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. The concentration of the Teutons exposes a
narrowness of another kind in ourselves; every time we are confronted with a
people of another type, a stone in the foundation of our complacency is
loosened. We are surprised by an uneasy feeling that our civilization does not
exhaust the possibilities of life; we are led to suspect that our problems derive
their poignancy from the fact that, at times, we mistake our own reasonings
about reality for reality itself. We become dimly aware that the world stretches
beyond our horizon, and as this apprehension takes shape, there grows upon
us a suspicion that some of the problems which baffle us are problems of our
own contrivance; our questionings often lead us into barren fastnesses instead
of releasing us into the length and breadth of eternity, and the reason may be
that we are trying to make a whole of fragments and not, as we thought,
attempting to grasp what is a living whole in itself. And at last, when we learn to
gaze at the world from a new point of view, revealing prospects which have
been concealed from our eyes, we may perhaps find that Hellas also contains
more things, riches as well as mysteries than are dreamt of in our philosophy;
after all, we have perhaps been no less romantic in our understanding of Greece than in our misunderstanding of the Teutons and other primitive peoples.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“In this ideal of justice the apparent conflict between the theories of law and the practice of everyday life is accounted for. The Teutons had a strong inclination for peaceable settlement of disputes, but mediation stood outside trying to effect a reconciliation by mutual agreement without in the least prejudicing the right of frith. Later law reflects an original Teutonic sense of justice insofar as it works up two separate tendencies into one system. The lawyers of the transition age tried to make mediation an integral part of the judicial proceedings and thus tend towards a legal system built up on the weighing and valuation of the offence at the same time as they worked for the abolishing of the ancient right of private revenge. By this harmonising process, Teutonic jurisprudence was gradually led into correspondence with Roman law, but it was slow in abandoning the idea of absolute reparation as the paramount condition of right and justice.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“The Germanic morality cannot be arranged in a hierarchy of good qualities. There is not the slightest approach among the Teutons to a system in which one virtue is vaulted above another like a series of heavens. Such an order of precedence presupposes centralisation; all men must be united under the same condemnation before they can be classified. Neither has the Germanic mind any conception of a common moral Gehenna. Strictly speaking, evil, nidinghood, has no reality at all, but must be interpreted as a negative, a total lack of human qualities. Nidinghood is the shadow every "honour" casts according to its nature. Therefore the boundary line between admiration and contempt stands sharply, without transition stages, without any neutral grey. And therefore the boundary lies differently for different people. What makes a man a niding, a criminal and a wretch, depends on what made him a man of honour.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“The Northmen had a keen eye for psychological signs of mixed race; a saying often on their lips was: "Who is it you take after?" And we have no grounds for supposing that it was only the one side that counted. Thorolfs opponents, the Sons of Hilderid already mentioned, never got over the disability in their birth, that their mother was of an inferior stock to their father's; it was a fault plainly seen in every word they spoke, when they stole into the hall from behind as soon as Thorolf had strode out of the front, and explained and interpreted the action of their enemy, while Thorolf let his act carry its own interpretation. The sagas also have an argument, to the effect that a man's rascality is due to the mother's blood.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2