"German is a language which was developed solely to afford the speaker the opportunity to spit at strangers under the guise of polite conversation."

from the "National Lamppon", 1973

"Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth"

from Mark Twain, "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"

both quotes appear in "The Guinness Dictionary of Poisonous Quotes", by Colin Jarman.

"The proverbial German phenomenon of the "verb-at-the-end", about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic pushing and popping. The confusion among the audience that out-of-order popping from the stack onto which the professor's verbs had been pushed, is amusing to imagine, could engender."

(Douglas R. Hofstadter in "Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid", pp. 130-131)