Life & Wisdom Quote by Gertrude Stein

Stein’s jab lands because it’s delivered with that deceptively plain, nursery-rhyme diction she perfected: short sentences, blunt nouns, a shrug of certainty. "I know what Germans are" opens like an anthropological pronouncement, then undercuts itself with "funny people" - a word that can mean amusing, strange, or suspect. The humor isn’t cozy; it’s diagnostic. By the time she gets to "always choosing someone", the line has shifted from national character joke to a bleak theory of political appetite.

The sting is in the paradox she frames as habit: Germans repeatedly select leaders who take them where they claim they don’t want to go. That’s not just a swipe at bad judgment; it’s an accusation of self-deception. The subtext is collective disavowal - the story a society tells itself after the fact: we didn’t want this, we were led, we were pushed. Stein collapses that defense by making the choice the central verb. The leaders aren’t imposed; they’re selected, again and again, like a compulsion.

Context matters. Stein was an American modernist who lived for decades in Europe, watching nationalism harden into catastrophe across the first half of the 20th century. Read against Weimar volatility and the rise of fascism, the line feels less like dinner-party provocation and more like an indictment of how democracies can vote for the strongman and then outsource responsibility to "history" or "circumstances". Her wit functions as a trap: you laugh at the "funny people" phrasing, then realize you’re being asked whether anyone is really innocent in the direction a country goes.