Gudrun Ensslin

“I feel that by her act, she did something liberating, even for our family”

“They must have wanted to tell us — Look, this is where we are, where you have brought us. It is the position you have put us in.”

“It astonished me that Gudrun, who has always thought in a very rational, intelligent way, has experienced what is almost a condition of euphoric self-realization, a really holy self-realization... To me, that is more of a shock than the fire of the arson itself—seeing a human being make her way to self-realization through such acts.”

“Don’t blather that it is too hard. The action to liberate Baader wasn’t crocheting doilies either.”

“This is the Auschwitz generation, and there's no arguing with them!”

“Violence is the only way to answer violence.”

“Ahab makes a great impression on his first appearance in Moby Dick... And if either by birth or by circumstance something pathological was at work deep in his nature, this did not detract from his dramatic character. For tragic greatness always derives from a morbid break with health, you can be sure of that.”

“Wonderful, I like cars, too, I like all the great things you can buy in a department store. But when you have to buy them in order to stay unaware, comatose, then the price you pay is too high.”

“I just can't believe that there won't come a day when people won't be fed-up with being overfed. That they won't get fed-up with the self-deception that all this fantastic food is the whole point of life.”

“The people in our country and in America and in all West European countries, they have to gorge and guzzle so that they don't even start to think about the fact that we have something to do with Vietnam or what it might be about, OK?”