More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet.
To live without an ardent dedication is to be adrift and abandoned.
The army is an instrument for bolstering, protecting and expanding the present.
the mass movement leader—
a force he alone can harness.
but never without belief in a devil.
like an ideal deity, the ideal devil is omnipotent and omnipresent.
the ideal devil is a foreigner.
an expression of a desperate effort to suppress an awareness of our inadequacy, worthlessness, guilt and other shortcomings of the self.
find others, as many as possible, who hate as we do.
the consciousness of our helplessness, inadequacy and cowardice
Self-contempt produces in man “the most unjust and criminal passions imaginable,
Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.
to treat an enemy with magnanimity is to blunt our hatred for him.
guilt.
unavoidable contrast between loftiness of profession and imperfection of practice.
the more sublime the faith the more virulent the ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
how the oppressed almost invariably shape themselves in the image of their hated oppressors.
hatred
We pay for it by losing all or many of the values we have set out to defend.
frustrated
a hatred for all that exists, and a craving for the end of the world.
Even when men league themselves mightily together to promote tolerance and peace on earth, they are likely to be violently intolerant toward those not of a like mind.
The truth is that the surrendering and humbling of the self breed pride and arrogance.
He who is not of his faith is evil; he who will not listen shall perish.
bloodshed, terror and destruction born of such generous enthusiasms as the love of God,
transmutes noble impulses into a reality of hatred and violence.
The less satisfaction we derive from being ourselves, the greater is our desire to be like others.
Imitation is often a shortcut to a solution.
The gifted propagandist brings to a boil ideas and passions already simmering in the minds of his hearers.
the music of their own souls they hear in the impassioned words of the propagandist.
Propaganda thus serves more to justify ourselves than to convince others; and the more reason we have to feel guilty, the more fervent our propaganda.
“However incompatible the spirit of Jesus and armed force may be, and however unpleasant it may be to acknowledge the fact,
It is a search for a final and irrefutable demonstration that our absolute truth is indeed the one and only truth.
concert and mobilize existing attitudes and impulses into the collective drive of a mass movement.
The uncanny powers of a leader manifest themselves not so much in the hold he has on the masses as in his ability to dominate and almost bewitch a small group of able men.
must submit wholly to the will of the leader,
the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.
To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint.
When the common undertaking fails, they are still spared the one thing they fear most, namely, the showing up of their individual shortcomings.
Surrender to a leader is not a means to an end but a fulfillment.
the leader can employ ruthless coercion. Where, as in an active mass movement, the leader can exact blind obedience, he can operate on the sound theory that all men are cowards,
“Marching diverts men’s thoughts. Marching kills thought. Marching makes an end of individuality.”
His happiness and fortitude come from his no longer being himself.
It is doubtful whether the excommunicated priest, the expelled Communist and the renegade chauvinist can ever find peace of mind as autonomous individuals. They cannot stand on their own, but must embrace a new cause and attach themselves to a new group.
By elevating dogma above reason, the individual’s intelligence is prevented from becoming self-reliant.
Where the articulate are absent or without a grievance, the prevailing dispensation, though incompetent and corrupt, may continue in power until it falls and crumbles of itself.
On the other hand, a dispensation of undoubted merit and vigor may be swept away if it fails to win the allegiance of the articulate minority.1
man of words undermines established institutions, discredits those in power, weakens prevailing beliefs and loyalties, and sets the stage for the rise of a mass movement.
the readying of the ground for a mass movement is done best by men whose chief claim to excellence is their skill in the use of the spoken or written word; that the hatching of an actual movement requires the temperament and the talents of the fanatic; and that the final consolidation of the movement is largely the work of practical men of action.
