The Little Drummer Boy Quotes

“It is true, however, that a dictator's problem is a self-fulfilling prophecy: precisely because he reserves the right of decision for himself, he soon finds himself required to decide everything.”
― John Vincent Palatine, The Little Drummer Boy

“Who was right?" Hitler asked at a rally in 1937. "The visionary or the others? - I was right.”
― John Vincent Palatine, The Little Drummer Boy

“It may be observed that Hitler always compared the crowd to a woman that needs, in his opinion, to be conquered, and in due time he became an expert in this form of seduction: a phantasmagorial Casanova for the previously abstemious - as far as politics were concerned - German Hausfrau.”
― John Vincent Palatine, The Little Drummer Boy

“It is a standard precaution in the religious leader business that the promises of salvation will find their proper fulfilment in the afterlife: neither prophets nor holy books come with a money-back guarantee.”
― John Vincent Palatine, The Little Drummer Boy

“When Hitler spoke, many people felt as if the daily shortages they experienced were not nuisances or danger but the proper fasting before the day of rapture.”
― John Vincent Palatine, The Little Drummer Boy

“Fascism in general was nationalist and authoritative; it evoked the supremacy of the State and those who serve it. National Socialism echoed these principles but saw the world, and history, ultimately as a fight between races.”
― John Vincent Palatine, The Little Drummer Boy

“Once it comprises the report of war, the composition of history has the well-known tendency to reflect the interpretations of the winner.”
― John Vincent Palatine, The Little Drummer Boy

“One fact, however, we may identify at once: in the grand theatre of European history, Adolf Hitler was, in a way, the last true protagonist, the last momentous ruler of the fair continent; for with him the power of European empires over the globe came to an end - the "Proud Tower" collapsed. Hitler took the last curtain call: after 1945, a new world order emerged, divided between Asia and America.”
― John Vincent Palatine, The Little Drummer Boy

“There has been - and remains - a discussion whether or not the war formed Hitler most, but there can be no doubt that without it, and the decorations he received in it and which gave him - the Austrian - as Joachim Fest remarked, a claim to front-line credibility, respect and authority in Bavaria, his political career, at least in Germany - a country whose citizenship he would not acquire until 1932 - was simply inconceivable. In this sense only the war made Hitler possible.”
― John Vincent Palatine, The Little Drummer Boy

“Many contemporary witnesses have pointed out Hitler's perhaps greatest talent - that of an actor - but his changeability has usually been depicted as a result of weakness instead of being understood as his main feature, the key to his character.”
― John Vincent Palatine, The Little Drummer Boy

“Thus we can say with some confidence that the breakthrough of the NSDAP in 1930 was less a result of the movement's inherent qualities, which until then seemed to have been a tough sell, but an expression of protest against the minority governments of late Weimar, which ruled, without the endorsement of parliamentary majorities, by presidential emergency decrees and responded to the economic crisis with ill-advised austerity measures that did little to alleviate economic progress but were guaranteed to raise ill will.”
― John Vincent Palatine, The Little Drummer Boy

“An attentive observer of the drama that repeated itself every night might have spotted among the poor the gaunt figure of a pale, earnest young man, who, despite the easy sociability of Vienna's outcasts, wore his embitterment as if it were a precious decoration.”
― John Vincent Palatine, The Little Drummer Boy

“History is philosophy teaching by examples.”
― John Vincent Palatine, The Little Drummer Boy