Looking back, I'm almost happy I lost that fight. Just imagine if I would have come back to Germany with a victory. I had nothing to do with the Nazis, but they would have given me a medal. After the war I might have been considered a war criminal.
Interpretation
Reflecting on past events can lead to unexpected gratitude for outcomes that seemed negative at the time.
In this quote, Max Schmeling reflects on his past experiences during the war, expressing that losing a fight ultimately spared him from a moral dilemma. He suggests that a victory would have linked him to the Nazi regime through a misplaced honor, which could have tarnished his legacy and potentially labeled him as a war criminal, highlighting the complexities of morality in historical contexts.
In practice
During a speech on the complexities of moral choices in times of war.
The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
It is impossible to have a Jewish, democratic state and at the same time to control all of Eretz Israel. If we insist on fulfilling the dream in its entirety, we are liable to lose it all. Everything. That is where the extremist path takes us.
Power is not sufficient evidence of truth.
The court is the bureaucracy of the law. If you bureaucratise popular justice then you give it the form of a court.
After all, you put a lot into creating a universe and everything that goes with it, and it seems a shame to use it only once.
Everlastingly chained to a single little fragment of the Whole, man himself develops into nothing but a fragment; everlastingly in his ear the monotonous sound of the wheel that he turns, he never develops the harmony of his being, and instead of putting the stamp of humanity upon his own nature, he becomes nothing more than the imprint of his occupation or of his specialized knowledge.
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