“I am the flower in the buttonhole” (by A. Einstein)

In 1925, Einstein made a three-month tour of South America. In Argentina he did not know how he would be received, because during the First World War the strong German community there had vilified him, accusing him “of propaganda against Germany and of having become a traitor to the fatherland”. He seems to have been well received, which did not prevent Einstein from leaving another pearl from his inexhaustible source of sarcasm:

Funny bunch, the Germans over there. To them I am like a smelly flower, and yet they keep putting me in their buttonhole.

(See Hookers, dung and university o An eschatological view of bureaucracy, for other Einstein’s verbal outbursts collected in this Blog).