Richard Karl Freiherr von Weizsäcker:
(born 15 April 1920 in Stuttgart; died 31 January 2015 in Berlin).
German politician (CDU). He served as Vice-President of the German Bundestag from 1979 to 1981 and as Governing Mayor of West Berlin from 1981 to 1984. From 1984 to 1994, he was the sixth Federal President of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1985, with his speech marking the 40th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe and the Nazi regime, he brought about a paradigm shift in Germany’s approach to its past by honouring 8 May 1945 as Liberation Day. During his second term in office, he became the first head of state of reunified Germany in 1990.
History does not repeat itself, but it does repeat its lessons.
A society that believes it cannot afford strong and independent unions denies itself the right to be called a free society.
Anyone who doesn’t dare to stand up for their freedom becomes a fare dodger of our liberal democracy.
Socialism is not booming at the moment. But whether it has definitively ended its function as a counterpart to capitalism remains to be seen. It made a decisive contribution to the criticism and thus to the correction of excesses of adaptive capitalism.
There are plenty of politicians who would gladly do the right thing if they didn’t know that doing the right thing will make them lose the next election.
Man needs nature, nature does not need man. Man is part of nature, he is not superior to it. Only if he understands that, he has a chance of survival.
Freedom is responsibility and an imposition to take one’s own affairs into one’s own hands, to recognize one’s own failures and to stand up for them, to prevent conflicts, to respect the freedom of others.
Three things tell the wise man: keep silent when fools speak; think when others believe and act when the lazy dream.
Freedom is a virtue that grows with use and fades away when not used.
This sentence describes freedom not as a static possession, but as something dynamic: It is not a state that one achieves once and then permanently “has,” but a good that must be actively lived and exercised in order to exist. Those who do not make use of their freedoms—such as freedom of opinion, choice, or action—risk losing them over time, whether through their own passivity, by adapting to external pressure, or because unused rights can be more easily curtailed politically. The idea is similar to the classic “use it or lose it” motif and can be found in similar form in the works of other thinkers on freedom (for example, in the notion that civil rights must be “vigilantly defended”).
Authorship:
This is where it gets interesting, because the sources are indeed inconsistent. The quote is attributed on the German-language internet to “two different members of the same family”:
– Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (1912–2007), physicist, philosopher. And peace researchers, uncle of Richard von Weizsäcker, and numerous quotations confirm this.
– Richard von Weizsäcker (1920–2015), Federal President from 1984 to 1994, nephew of Carl Friedrich – also very frequently cited as the source, sometimes even on seemingly reputable websites.
Both names appear with roughly equal frequency, often even on different pages of the same provider with contradictory attributions. I could not find a clear primary source – such as a specific speech, book, or essay with a page reference – in the search results; it circulates practically only as a loose quotation on quotation collection websites, without any source.
This is no coincidence in the case of the two Weizsäckers: They are frequently confused in quotation databases because they share the same surname, both were publicly influential, statesmen with intellectual profiles, and both liked to speak about freedom, democracy, and responsibility. Richard von Weizsäcker is also known for his famous speech on May 8, 1985, in which similar themes of freedom and responsibility resonate, making the attribution to him seem plausible, even without the exact wording being found there.
