Daily Inspiration Quote by Otto Schily

Schily’s line is a chilling bit of bureaucratic realism: it tries to sound like deterrence while admitting deterrence may not work. The opening clause, “a warning to all those,” performs the ritual of state power - the government must be seen issuing warnings, drawing bright lines, projecting control. Then the sentence undercuts that posture with its blunt diagnosis: if someone is prepared to “destroy their own lives,” the classic tools of punishment lose leverage. The state can threaten prison, social ruin, even death; the would-be martyr has already priced that in.

That’s the subtext: counterterrorism isn’t only a police problem, it’s a motivation problem. Schily frames this as a psychological asymmetry. Liberal democracies rely on citizens valuing a future - a career, family, reputation - because law works best when it can bargain with what people want to protect. The terrorist network, in this view, recruits precisely by severing those ties, turning self-preservation into a weakness and self-erasure into proof of commitment.

Context matters: Schily, as Germany’s interior minister in the post-9/11 era, spoke from the pressure cooker where public fear demands certainty and security services live with uncertainty. His phrasing quietly prepares the public for measures that move beyond simple deterrence: surveillance, disruption, prevention, de-radicalization. It’s also a political inoculation. If deterrence fails, the failure is pre-explained: you can’t deter someone who has made dying - or ruining their life - part of the plan.