“General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”— Ronald Reagan, archives.gov
“Anyone who replies to the signals of desolidarization with an appeal to the ‘self-confident nation’ or by calling for a return to the ‘normality’ of the reestablished national state, is using the devil to drive out Satan. For these unsolved global problems reveal precisely the limits of the nation-s…”— Jürgen Habermas, amazon.com
“The Iron Curtain has been supplanted by a mental glass curtain. The Berlin wall has been supplanted by the invisible wall, the unrelenting wall of the interface and transparency which, unlike the other, lets everything through, transfuses all light, relentlessly illuminates every nook and cranny, ev…”— Jean Baudrillard, amazon.com
“Outsiders seem to think that it was the opening of the Wall that brought us our freedom. It was the other way around. First we fought for our freedom; and then, because of that, the Wall fell.”— Marianne Birthler, amazon.com
“The Wall’s opening was not a gift from political elites and was in no way predetermined. It resulted from a remarkable constellation of actors and contingent events that came together in a precise but entirely unplanned sequence. Rather than rely on false assumptions that matters were inevitable and…”— Mary Elise Sarotte, amazon.com
“The Berlin Wall, retrospectively signifying the imprisonment of a population presume desirous of escaping Soviet domination, was originally conceived as a protective cordon around a fragile new society, a society based on work, cooperation, and egalitarianism, rather than individualism, competition,…”— Wendy Brown, amazon.com
“It is impossible to capture the tremor of terror. Everything is insignificant — here, at the pinnacle of history self-exposed by its violence, everything is eerily quiet like an abandoned November field.”— Jean Baudrillard, amazon.com