Believe me, our moral and political world is mined with subterranean passages, cellars and cesspits, much as a city tends to be, which no one thinks and reflects on their connections and relations among their inhabitants; they only become much more comprehensible to someone who has some knowledge of them, when there the ground collapses, there smoke rises from a ravine, here strange voices are heard.”
1 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, 40 vols. ed. Friedmar Apel, Hendrik Birus et al., (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987f.), vol. 29, 360. “I have traces, not to say reports, of a great mass of lies creeping about in the darkness, of which you seem to have no sense. Believe me, our moral and political world is mined with subterranean passages, cellars and cesspits, much as a city tends to be, which no one thinks and reflects on their connections and relations among their inhabitants; they only become much more comprehensible to someone who has some knowledge of them, when there the ground collapses, there smoke rises from a ravine, here strange voices are heard.”