Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to experience it.
Max FrischTHE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE. Even what they eat and drink, these palefaces who don't know what wine istheir uglinesstheir pink sausage skin, horrible, they only live because there is penicillin,... the world as an Americanized vacuumtheir fake health, their fake youthfulnessthe way they use cosmetics even on corpses, their whole pornographic attitude to death.
Max FrischA joke is a good camouflage. Next best comes sentiment... But the best camouflage of all - in my opinion - is the plain and simple truth. Because nobody ever believes it.
Max FrischThe difference between an author and a horse is that the horse doesn't understand the horse dealer's language.
Max FrischThou shalt not, it is said, make unto thee any graven image of God. The same commandment should apply when God is taken to mean the living part of every human being, the part that cannot be grasped. It is a sin that, however much it is committed against us, we almost continually commit ourselves--Except when we love.
Max FrischWe live technologically, with man as the master of nature, man as the engineer, and let anyone who raises his voice against it stop using bridges not built by nature.... No electric light bulbs, no engines, no atomic energy, no calculating machines, no anaesthetics-back to the jungle.
Max FrischPrimitive peoples tried to annul death by portraying the human body--we do it by finding substitutes for the human body. Technology instead of mysticism!
Max FrischWhen we travel, we are like a film at the moment of exposure; it is memory that will develop it.
Max FrischTravelling, gentlemen, is medieval, today we have means of communication, not to speak of tomorrow and the day after, means of communication that bring the world into our homes, to travel from one place to another is atavistic.
Max FrischIt's precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.
Max FrischTechnology as the knack of eliminating the world as resistance,... the technologist's worldlessness.... My mistake lay in the factthat we technologists try to live without death.
Max FrischA man with convictions finds an answer for everything. Convictions are the best form of protection against the living truth.
Max FrischA real life, a life that leaves a deposit in the shape of something alive.... It's difficult to say what makes a life a real life.... You could also say it depends on a person being identical with himself.
Max FrischA society needs famous people; the question is whom it chooses for that role. Any criticism of its choice is by implication a criticism of that society.
Max FrischStillertook part in the Spanish Civil WarIt is not clear what impelled him to this military gesture. Probably many factors were combined--a rather romantic Communism, such as was common among bourgeois intellectuals at that time.
Max FrischIn actual fact those who do not care for politics and sit on the fence do indeed side for a political party: The ruling party.
Max FrischWe live in an age of reproduction. Most of what makes up our personal picture of the world we have never seen with our own eyes--or rather, we've seen it with our own eyes, but not on the spot: our knowledge comes to us from a distance, we are televiewers, telehearers, teleknowers.
Max FrischThere are all sorts of ways of murdering a person or at least his soul, and that's something no police in the world can spot.
Max FrischWhen you say a friend has a sense of humor do you mean that he makes you laugh, or that he can make you laugh?
Max FrischIt is conceivable at least that a late generation, such as we presumably are, has particular need of the sketch, in order not to be strangled to death by inherited conceptions which preclude new births.... The sketch has direction, but no ending; the sketch as reflection of a view of life that is no longer conclusive, or is not yet conclusive.
Max FrischPerhaps there are only a few women who experience without deception the overwhelming intoxication of the senses which they expectfrom their encounters with men, which they feel bound to expect because of the fuss made about it in novels, written by men.
Max FrischStrictly speaking, every citizen above a certain level of income is guilty of some offense.
Max FrischThe technologist was the final guise of the white missionary, industrialization the last gospel of a dying race and living standards a substitute for a purpose in living.
Max FrischIt is only the consciousness of a nonexistence which allows us to realize for moments that we are living.
Max FrischI don't believe in providence and fate, as a technologist I am used to reckoning with the formulae of probability.
Max Frisch