Everyone is born into a certain era. I wouldn't want to see anyone faced with the circumstances that prevailed at the time, when there were few or no alternatives.
We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes that the future consequences of current environmental issues are already measurable.
Gunter Grass highlights that the alarming statistics regarding pollution, overpopulation, and desertification serve as a clear indication of the future we are headed toward. By stating 'the future is already in place,' he points out the urgency of addressing these critical issues, which have already been set in motion by our present actions. It serves as a call to action to understand the implications of our current path and to make necessary changes to secure a sustainable future.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about climate change, to emphasize the urgency of addressing pollution.
More from Gunter Grass
All quotes βI wept when the muse Ulla bent over me. Blinded by tears I could not prevent her from kissing me, I could not prevent the Muse from giving me that terrible kiss. All of you who have ever been kissed by the Muse will surely understand that Oskar, once branded by that kiss, was condemned to take back the drum he had rejected years before, the drum he had buried in the sand of Sapse Cemetery.
Today I know that all things are watching, that nothing goes unseen, that even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings.
I did not volunteer for the Waffen SS, but was, as were thousands of my year group, conscripted. I did not then know as a 17-year-old that it was a criminal unit. I thought it was an elite unit.
Art is uncompromising, and life is full of compromises.
If work and leisure are soon to be subordinated to this one utopian principle - absolute busyness - then utopia and melancholy will come to coincide: an age without conflict will dawn, perpetually busy - and without consciousness.
Similar quotes
In the real world, 90% of the money spent on medical research is focused on conditions that are responsible for just 10% of the deaths and disability caused by diseases globally.
If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity.
As long as our brain is a mystery, the universe, the reflection of the structure of the brain will also be a mystery.
One can't predict the weather more than a few days in advance.
Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.
It is hard to look at the tumor and not come away with the feeling that one has encountered a powerful monster in its infancy