Test III - Quotes Flashcards
“Fascism {is} the complete opposite of … Marxian Socialism, the materialist conception of history; according to which the history of human civilisation can be explained simply through the conflict of interests among the various social groups and by the change and development in the means and instruments of production.”
Benito Mussolini - “Fascist Doctrines”
“After Socialism, Fascism combats the whole complex system of democratic ideology, and repudiates it, whether in its theoretical premises or in its practical application. Fascism denies that the majority, by the simple fact that it is a majority, can direct human society; it denies that numbers alone can govern by means of a periodical consultation, and it affirms the immutable beneficial, and fruitful inequality of mankind, which can never be permanently levelled through the mere operation of a mechanical process such as universal suffrage…”
Benito Mussolini - “Fascist Doctrines”
“Given that the nineteenth century was the century of Socialism, of Liberalism, and of Democracy, it does not necessarily follow that the twentieth century must also be a century of Socialism, Liberalism, and Democracy: political doctrines pass, but humanity remains; and it may rather be expected that this will be a century of authority, …”
Benito Mussolini - “Fascist Doctrines”
“This will be the century of Collectivism, …”
Benito Mussolini - “Fascist Doctrines”
“The Fascist State organises the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the later is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone…”
Benito Mussolini - “Fascist Doctrines”
“Critically I studied this slight, pale man, his brown hair parted on one side and falling again and again over his sweating brow. Threatening and beseeching, with small, pleading hands and flaming, steel-blue eyes, he had the look of a fanatic.
Presently my critical faculty was swept away. Leaning from the tribune as if he were trying to impel his inner self into the consciousness of all these thousands, he was holding the masses, and me with them, under a hypnotic spell by the sheer force of his conviction.”
Kurt G. W. Ludecke - “I Knew Hitler”
“Awake, Germany! There was a thunderous applause, then the masses took a solemn oath “to save Germany in Bavaria from Bolshevism.”
Kurt G. W. Ludecke - “I Knew Hitler”
“I felt sure than no one who had heard Hitler that afternoon could doubt that he was the man of destiny. the vitalising force in the future of Germany. The masses who had streamed into the Koenigsplatz with a stern sense of national humiliation seemed to be going forth renewed.”
Kurt G. W. Ludecke - “I Knew Hitler”
“As philosophy it repudiated … reason, and the … ideological conceptions of bygone decades, it expressed itself as an irrationalistic throwback, placing the conception life at the centre of thought, and raised on its standard the powers of the unconscious, the dynamic, the darkly creative, which alone were life-giving.”
Thomas Mann - “An Appeal to Reason”
“And there is even more: there are other intellectual elements come to strengthen this national-social political movement - a certain ideology, a Nordic creed, a Germanistic romanticism, from philological, academic, professorial spheres. It addresses the Germany of 1930 in a highflown wishy-washy jargon full of mystical good feeling, with hyphenated prefixes like race- and fold- and fellowship-, and lends to the movement a … fanatical cult-barbarism, … dangerous and estranging, with … power to clog and stultify the brain…”
Thomas Mann - “An Appeal to Reason”
“… Why, one may choose what is contrary to one’s own interests, and sometimes one positively ought (that is my idea). One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own fancy, however wild it may be, why that is that very “most advantageous advantage” which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and through which all systems and theories are continually being sent to the devil. And how do these sages know that many must necessarily need a rationally advantageous choice? What man needs is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. Well, choice, after all, the devil only knows…”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - “Notes from the Underground”
“The most fearful and fundamental desire in man, his drive for power – this drive is called “freedom” – must be held in check the longest. This is why ethics… has hitherto aimed at holding the desire for power in check: it disparages the tyrannical individual and with its glorification of social welfare and patriotism emphasises the power-instinct of the herd.”
Nietzsche - “To Will To Power”
” ‘The will to power’ is so hated in democratic ages that their entire psychology seems directed toward belittling and defaming it…”
Nietzsche - “To Will To Power”
” I am opposed to 1. socialism, because it dreams quite naively of ‘the good, true, and beautiful’ and of ‘equal rights’ ; 2. parliamentary government and the press, because these are the means by which the herd animal becomes master.”
Nietzsche - “To Will To Power”
“… Another Christian concept, no less crazy, has passed even more deeply into the tissue of modernity: the concept of the ‘equality of souls before God.’ This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights: mankind was first taught to stammer the proposition of equality in a religious context, and only later was it made into morality: no wonder that man ended by taking it seriously, taking it practically!– that is to say, politically, democratically, socialistically, in the spirit of the pessimism of indignation…”
Nietzsche - “To Will To Power”
“A declaration of war on the masses by higher men is needed! Everywhere the mediocre are combining in order to make themselves master! Everything that makes soft and effeminate, that serves the ends of the ‘people’ or the ‘feminine’ “
Nietzsche - “To Will To Power”
“The root of all evil: that the slavish morality of meekness, chastity, selflessness, absolute obedience, has triumphed– ruling natures were thus condemned (1) to hypocrisy, (2) to torments of conscience– creative natures felt like rebels against God, uncertain and inhibited by eternal values…”
Nietzsche - “To Will To Power”
“I teach: that there are higher and lower men, and that a single individual can under certain circumstances justify the existence of whole millennia– that is, a full, rich, great, whole human being in relation to countless incomplete fragmentary men.”
Nietzsche - “To Will To Power”
“The highest men live beyond the rulers, freed from all bonds; and in the rulers they have their instruments.”
Nietzsche - “To Will To Power”
“Not ‘mankind’ but overman is the goal!”
Nietzsche - “To Will To Power”
“What is more harmful than any vice?– Active sympathy for the ill-constituted and weak– Christianity…”
Nietzsche - “The Antichrist”
“One should not embellish or dress up Christianity: it has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man, it has excommunicated all the fundamental instincts of this type, it has distilled evil, the Evil One, out of these instincts– the strong human being as the type of reprehensibility, as the ‘outcast.’ Christianity has taken the side of everything weak, base, ill-constituted, it has made an ideal out of opposition to the preservative instincts of strong life; it has depraved the reason even of the intellectually strongest natures by teaching men to feel the supreme values of intellectuality as sinful, as misleading, as temptations.”
Nietzsche - “The Antichrist”
“The poison of the doctrine ‘equal rights for all’– this has been more thoroughly sowed by Christianity than by anything else; from the most secret recesses of base instincts, Christianity has waged a war to the death against every feeling of reverence and distance between man and man, against, that is, the precondition of every elevation, every increase in culture– it has forged out of the [resentment] of the masses its chief weapon against us, against everything noble, joyful, high-spirited on earth, against our happiness on earth…”
Nietzsche - “The Antichrist”
“The mind of the hysterical patient is full of active yet unconscious ideas; all her symptoms proceed from such ideas. It is intact the most striking character of the hysterical mind to be ruled by them. If the hysterical woman vomits, she may do so from the idea of being pregnant. She has, however, no knowledge of this idea, although it can easily be detected in her mind, and made conscious to her, by one of the technical procedures of psychoanalysis. If she is executing the jerks and movements constituting her ‘fit,’ she does not even consciously represent to herself the intended actions, and she may perceive those actions with the detached feelings of an onlooker. Nevertheless analysis will show that she was acting her part in the dramatic reproduction of some incident in her life, the memory of which was unconsciously active during the attack. The same preponderance of active unconscious ideas is revealed by analysis as the essential fact in the psychology of all other forms of neurosis…”
Freud - “A Note On The Unconscious In Psychoanalysis”
“The existence of this inclination to aggression, which we can detect in ourselves and justly assume to be present in others, is the factor which disturbs our relations with our neighbour and which forces civilisation into such a high expenditure {of energy}. In consequence of this primary mutual hostility of human beings, civilised society is perpetually threatened with disintegration.”
Freud - “Civilisation and Its Discontents”
“The ownership of private wealth gives the individual power, and with it the temptation to ill-treat his neighbour; while the man who is excluded from possession is bound to rebel in hostility against his oppressor. If private property were abolished, all wealth held in common, and everyone allowed to share in the enjoyment of it, ill-will and hostility would disappear among men.”
Freud - “Civilisation and Its Discontents”
“…In the collective mind the intellectual aptitudes of the individuals, and in consequence their individuality, are weakened … and the unconscious qualities obtain the upper hand…”
Le Bon – “Mass Psychology”
“… In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest. This is an aptitude very contrary to his nature, and of which a man is scarcely capable, except when he {is} part of a crowd….”
Le Bon – “Mass Psychology”
“Such also is approximately the state of the individual forming part of a psychological crowd. He is no longer conscious of his acts. In his case, as in the case of the hypnotised subject, at the same time that certain faculties are destroyed, others may be brought to a high degree of exaltation.”
Le Bon – “Mass Psychology”
“In consequence, a crowd perpetually hovering on the borderland of unconsciousness, readily yielding to all suggestions, having all the violence of feeling peculiar to beings who cannot appeal to the influence of reason, deprived of all critical faculty, cannot be otherwise than excessively credulous.”
Le Bon – “Mass Psychology”
“…Crowds are to some extent in the position of the sleeper whose reason, suspended for the time being, allows the arousing in his mind of images of extreme intensity which would quickly be dissipated could they be submitted tot he action of reflection. Crowds, being incapable both of reflection and of reasoning, are devoid of the notion of improbability; and it is to be noted that in a general way it is the most improbably things that are the most striking.”
Le Bon – “Mass Psychology”
“Intolerance and fanaticism are the necessary accompaniments of the religious sentiment…..
All founders of religious or political creeds have established them solely because they were successful in inspiring crowds with those fanatical sentiments which have as result that men find their happiness in worship and obedience and are ready to lay down their lives for their idol. This has been the case at all epochs…”
Le Bon – “Mass Psychology”
“…One must say with the greatest determination: War is for an afflicted people the only remedy. When the State exclaims: My very existence is at stake! then social self-seeking must disappear and all party hatred be silent. The individual must forget his own ego and feel himself a member of the whole, he must recognise how negligible is his life compared with the good of the whole. Therein lies the greatness of war that the little man completely vanishes before the great thought of the State. The sacrifice of nationalities for one another is nowhere invested with such beauty as in war.”
Heinrich von Treitschke – “The Greatness of War”
“…War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with, since without it an unhealthy development will follow, which excludes every advancement of the race, and therefore all real civilisation. ‘War is the father of all things.’”
Friedrich von Bernhardi – “Germany and the Next War”
“The crime at Servajevo {the assassination of Ferdinand} has aroused among the Servians an expectation that in the immediate future the Hapsburg States will fall to pieces;…”
Baron von Giesl – “Memorandum”
“Austria-Hungary, hated as she is, now appears to the Serbians as powerless, and as scarcely worthy of waging war with; contempt is mingled with hatred; she is ripe for destruction, and she is to fall without trouble into the lap of the Great-Servian Empire, which is to be realised in the immediate future.”
Baron von Giesl – “Memorandum”
“If we delay in clearing up our relations with Servia, we shall share the responsibility for the difficulties and the unfavourable situation in any future war which must, however, sooner or later be carried through.”
Baron von Giesl – “Memorandum”
“Half measures, the presentation of demands, followed by long discussions and ending only in an unsound compromise, would be the hardest blow which could be directed against Austria-Hungary’s reputation in Servia and her position in Europe.”
Baron von Giesl – “Memorandum”
“The people who had read it moved away, stunned, while others crowded in, but this silent numbness did to last. Suddenly a heroic wind lifted their heads. What? War, was it? Well, then, let’s go! Without any signal, the Marseillaise” poured from thousands of throats, sheafs of flags appeared at windows, and howling processions rolled out on the boulevards.”
Roland Dorgelès – “After Fifty Years”
“The first shock at the news of war-the war that no one, people or government, had wanted … had suddenly been transformed into enthusiasm. There were parades in the street, flags, ribbons, and music burst forth everywhere, young recruits were marching triumphantly, their faces lighting up at the cheering-they, the John Does … who usually go unnoticed and uncelebrated.”
Stefan Zweig – “The World of Yesterday”
“A rapid excursion into the romantic, a wild, manly adventure-that is how the war of 1914 was painted in the imagination of the simple man, and the young people were honestly afraid that they might miss this most wonderful and exciting experience of their lives; that is why the hurried and thronged to the colors, and that is why they shouted and sang in the trains that carried them to the slaughter; wildly and feverishly the red wave of blood coursed through the veins of the entire nation.”
Stefan Zweig – “The World of Yesterday”
“Treitschke and Bernhardi (to say nothing of the National Liberal beer-swilling heroes) seemed to have multiplied a thousandfold.”
Philipp Scheidemann – “Berlin: ‘The Hour We Yearned For’”
