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For many years, and like many British people, I had little feeling for the most expressive and roughest form of early twentieth century European painting, the expressionism of German artists around the First World War like Kirchner.

 

Nicholas Serota

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I accept the fact that the important painting of the last hundred years was done in France. American painters have generally missed the point of modern painting from beginning to end... Thus the fact that good European moderns (European artists who lived in the U.S. because of the Nazi-regime, fh) are now here is very important, for they bring with them an understanding of the problems of modern painting. I am particularly impressed with their concept of the source of art being the unconscious. These idea interests me more than these specific artists do, for the two artists I admire most, Picasso and Miró, are still abroad.

 

Jackson Pollock

 

The eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant had conjectured that Messier's nebulae were distant "island universes" outside our Milky Way galaxy, but many scientists in the early twentieth century disagreed.

 

John (physicist) Moffat

 

Wilson's principles survived the eclipse of the Versailles system and that they still guide European politics today: self-determination, democratic government, collective security, international law, and a league of nations. Wilson may not have gotten everything he wanted at Versailles, and his treaty was never ratified by the Senate, but his vision and his diplomacy, for better or worse, set the tone for the twentieth century. France, Germany, Italy, and Britain may have sneered at Wilson, but every one of these powers today conducts its European policy along Wilsonian lines. What was once dismissed as visionary is now accepted as fundamental. This was no mean achievement, and no European statesman of the twentieth century has had as lasting, as benign, or as widespread an influence.

 

(Thomas) Woodrow Wilson

 

I don't mean that it is important whether a few of us like Goering, myself, or the others are sentenced to death or hard labor or whatever, but to the German people we will always remain their leaders, right or wrong, and in a few years even you Americans and the rest of the world will see this trial as a mistake. The German people will learn to hate the Americans, distrust the British and French, and unfortunately, perhaps be taken in by the Russians. That will be the worst calamity of all. I hate to think of Moscow ruling Germany or Germany becoming a territorial possession of the Soviet Union. The Allies should take the attitude, now that the war is over, that mistakes have been made on both sides, that those of us here on trial are German patriots, and that though we may have been misled and gone too far with Hitler, we did it in good faith and as German citizens. Furthermore, the German people will always regard our condemnation by a foreign court as unjust and will consider us martyrs.

 

Joachim von Ribbentrop

 

Some painters, including myself, do not care what chair they are sitting on. It does not even has to be a comfortable one. They are too nervous to find out were they ought to sit. They do not want to ‘sit in style’. Rather they have found that painting – any kind of painting, any style of painting – to be painting at all, in fact – a style of living, so to speak. That is where the form of it lies. It is exactly in its uselessness that it is free. Those artists don’t want to conform. They only want to be inspired.

 

Willem de Kooning