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Daily Inspiration Quote by Otto Schily

"We feel very honored to have been offered the responsibility to host this great event, Berlin is a wonderful city that is developing at a tremendous rate, and this decision means that we can now prepare to welcome the world's best athletes to a fascinating place"

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The language is all velvet rope and civic boosterism, but the intent is hard-edged: legitimacy. Schily isn’t just celebrating a hosting bid; he’s laundering Berlin’s image through sport, turning “responsibility” into a moral credential and “honored” into a pre-emptive defense against scrutiny. That word choice matters coming from a German interior minister-turned-statesman figure: he’s speaking in the register of governance, where every “welcome” is also an exercise in control, logistics, and reputation management.

“Berlin is a wonderful city that is developing at a tremendous rate” is the quiet thesis. It’s not about athletes; it’s about a city still narrating its post-Wall transformation to the world and to itself. The subtext is that Berlin’s volatility (political, economic, cultural) is being reframed as momentum. “Developing” smuggles in a promise of modernity without naming the messiness: construction, displacement, security apparatus, the perennial question of who the new Berlin is actually for.

The sentence is engineered like a bid document: big nouns (“responsibility,” “decision”) paired with soft adjectives (“great,” “fascinating”). It fuses two audiences. Internationally, it pitches Berlin as safe, cosmopolitan, future-facing. Domestically, it sells the event as a national milestone: proof that Germany can host “the world’s best” without the historical footnotes dominating the frame.

Even the climax, “welcome the world’s best athletes,” is a proxy for welcoming the world’s attention. The event becomes a camera, and Schily is aligning Berlin’s story with a global script of progress.

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TopicSports
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APA Style (7th ed.)
Schily, Otto. (2026, January 15). We feel very honored to have been offered the responsibility to host this great event, Berlin is a wonderful city that is developing at a tremendous rate, and this decision means that we can now prepare to welcome the world's best athletes to a fascinating place. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-feel-very-honored-to-have-been-offered-the-152530/

Chicago Style
Schily, Otto. "We feel very honored to have been offered the responsibility to host this great event, Berlin is a wonderful city that is developing at a tremendous rate, and this decision means that we can now prepare to welcome the world's best athletes to a fascinating place." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-feel-very-honored-to-have-been-offered-the-152530/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"We feel very honored to have been offered the responsibility to host this great event, Berlin is a wonderful city that is developing at a tremendous rate, and this decision means that we can now prepare to welcome the world's best athletes to a fascinating place." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-feel-very-honored-to-have-been-offered-the-152530/. Accessed 19 Feb. 2026.

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Otto Schily on Berlin hosting a major sporting event
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About the Author

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Otto Schily (born July 20, 1932) is a Public Servant from Germany.

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