The Ominous Parallels Quotes

“The deepest roots of this modern shift are twofold: in epistemology, the romanticist advocacy of feeling as superior to reason; in ethics, the altruist advocacy of others as superior to self. The result is a view of morality in which the ruling standard is: the feelings of others.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“The process of spreading a philosophy by means of free discussion among thinking adults is long and complex. From Plato to the present, it has been the dream of social planners to circumvent this process and, instead, to inject a controversial ideology directly into the plastic, unformed minds of children—by means of seizing a country’s educational system and turning it into a vehicle for indoctrination. In this way one may capture an entire generation without intellectual resistance, in a single coup d’école.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“The nationalists, at heart, were socialists. The socialists, at heart, were nationalists.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“Statism and the advocacy of reason are philosophical opposites. They cannot coexist—neither in a philosophic system nor in a nation.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“The fundamental goal of education, writes Dewey, ”is the development of a spirit of social co-operation and community life....“ The goal is to foster the child’s ”social capacity“—by, among other things, ”saturating him with the spirit of service....“21”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“The goal of the Progressive indoctrinators was not to impose a specific system of ideas on the student, but to destroy his capacity to hold any firm ideas, on any subject.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“Egoists hold that a man’s primary moral obligation is to achieve his own welfare (egoists do not necessarily agree on the nature of man’s welfare).”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“If men uphold reason, they will be led, ultimately, to conclude that men should deal with one another as free agents, settling their disputes by an appeal to the mind, i.e., by a process of voluntary, rational persuasion. If men reject reason, they will be led, ultimately, to conclude the opposite: that men have no way to deal with one another at all—no way except physical force, wielded by an elite endowed with an allegedly superior, mystic means of cognition.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“The best-known version of this view, the Existentialism of the fifties and sixties, held that reality is absurd and that irrational passion is the only means of knowledge.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“The defenders of capitalism spent their time broadcasting the vibrations of guilt and futility. Implicitly or explicitly, they were telling the country: human intelligence is impotent to control the course of society, men are helpless in the face of their own motivation, laissez-faire appeals to the evil in men, but men are stuck with it.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“Racial subjectivism holds that a man’s inborn racial constitution determines his mental processes, his intellectual outlook, his thought patterns, his feelings, his conclusions—and that these conclusions, however well established, are valid only for members of a given race, who share the same underlying constitution.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“Hegel would not have been possible but for Kant, who would not have been possible but for Plato. These three, more than any others, are the intellectual builders of Auschwitz.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“Christianity prepared the ground. It paved the way for modern totalitarianism by entrenching three fundamentals in the Western mind: in metaphysics, the worship of the supernatural; in epistemology, the reliance on faith; as a consequence, in ethics, the reverence for self-sacrifice”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“Here are the ominous parallels. Our universities are strongholds of German philosophy disseminating every key idea of the post-Kantian axis, down by now to old-world racism and romanticist technology-hatred. Our culture is modernism worn-out but recycled, with heavy infusions of such Weimarian blends as astrology and Marx, or Freud and Dada, or “humanitarianism” and horror-worship, along with five decades of corruption built on this kind of base. Our youth activists, those reared on the latest viewpoints at the best universities, are the pre-Hitler youth movement resurrected (this time mostly on the political left and addicted to drugs). Our political parties are the Weimar coalition over again, offering the same pressure-group pragmatism, and the same kind of contradiction between their Enlightenment antecedents and their statist commitments. The liberals, more anti-ideological than the moderate German left, have given up even talking about long-range plans and demand more controls as a matter of routine, on a purely ad hoc basis. The conservatives, much less confident than the nationalist German right, are conniving at this routine and apologizing for the remnants of their own tradition, capitalism (because of its clash with the altruist ethics)—while demanding government intervention in or control over the realms of morality, religion, sex, literature, education, science. Each of these groups, observing the authoritarian element in the other, accuses it of Fascist tendencies; the charge is true on both sides. Each group, like its Weimar counterpart, is contributing to the same result: the atmosphere of chronic crisis, and the kinds of controls, inherent in an advanced mixed economy. The result of this result, as in Germany, is the growth of national bewilderment or despair, and of the governmental apparatus necessary for dictatorship. In America, the idea of public ownership of the means of production is a dead issue. Our intellectual and political leaders are content to retain the forms of private property, with public control over its use and disposal. This means: in regard to economic issues, the country’s leadership is working to achieve not the communist version of dictatorship, but the Nazi version. Throughout its history, in every important cultural and political area, the United States, thanks to its distinctive base, always lagged behind the destructive trends of Germany and of the rest of the modern world. We are catching up now. We are still the freest country on earth. There is no totalitarian (or even openly socialist) party of any size here, no avowed candidate for the office of Führer, no economic or political catastrophe sufficient to make such a party or man possible—so far—and few zealots of collectivism left to urge an ever faster pursuit of national suicide. We are drifting to the future, not moving purposefully. But we are drifting as Germany moved, in the same direction, for the same kind of reason.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“rule by the losers—by those who, for whatever reason, cannot or choose not to achieve values on their own, but depend instead on the work and effort of others.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“There must be a new kind of equality in the country, the egalitarians say; not the Founding Fathers’ equality of individual rights, or even the older reformists’ undefined “equality of opportunity,” but a militantly specific “equality of results”; the “results” must be equal for all, regardless of any man’s or group’s efforts, virtues, or merits. Men must be equal in goods and services, regardless of ability to pay. They must be equal in jobs and promotions, regardless of qualifications or performance (e.g., the quota system). They must be equal in college training regardless of academic preparation (open admissions); in cultural prestige regardless of talent (minority-group art subsidies); in authority regardless of knowledge (Student Power); in moral respectability regardless of behavior (Gay Lib); in credit for achievement regardless of achievement (Women’s Lib).”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“The Nazis preached a certain philosophy—and they carried it out in action. They preached authority above rights, the group above the individual, sacrifice above happiness, nihilism above morality, feelings above facts, pliability above absolutes, obedience above logic, the Führer above the self—and they applied it.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“In accordance with the method of “German socialism,” the facade of a market economy was retained. All prices, wages, and interest rates, however, were “fixed by the central authority. They [were] prices, wages, and interest rates in appearance only; in reality they [were] merely determinations of quantity relations in the government’s orders.... This is socialism in the outward guise of capitalism.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“The children declared that they would never speak of ‘I’ but only of ‘we.’ ”2”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“Special government bodies were created to control—according to the requirements of “the public interest”—every aspect of literature, music, the fine arts, the theater, the movies, radio, and the press. Hundreds of tons of books were destroyed; the Marxists and the cultural modernists (and several other groups) had done their job; Hitler had no further need for anarchy and subversion of the system. The Churches were not regarded as subversive; though harassed and intimidated, they were allowed to function.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“The first major step was the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State, promulgated (by the aged Hindenburg) on February 28, 1933. This decree abrogated individual rights in Germany. Restrictions on personal liberty [the decree stated], on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications; and warrants for house searchers, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.1”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“I remember Germany and Austria in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s,” writes an American who served in the U.S. Embassy in Austria. The “idealistic youth” broke up classrooms, invaded university campuses, broke shop windows. The liberals of Berlin and Vienna sprang to the defense of the youth. They labeled any police action against them as ‘brutality.’ One of the phrases used to describe the idealistic German youth by editorial writers and educators, believe it or not, was ‘the culturally deprived.’ ... When they broke windows of Jewish shops, the liberals—even intellectual Jews of Germany and Austria—said: ‘how else shall they show their resentment? Most of the shops just happen to be owned by Jews.’17”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“Nazism is the final extreme of nihilism,”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“In the orgy which was the cultural atmosphere of the Weimar Republic, the Germans could not work to resolve their differences. Disintegrated by factionalism, traumatized by crisis, and pumped full of the defiant rejection of reason, in every form and from all sides, the Germans felt not calm, but hysteria; not confidence in regard to others, but the inability to communicate with them; not hope, but despair; not the desire for solutions to their problems, but the need for scapegoats; and, as a result, not goodwill, but fury, blind fury at their enemies, real or imagined.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“The Nazi formations were trained to vent fury and sow terror—to break up meetings of opponents, to administer beatings, provoke street fights, stage riots, mutilate bodies, kick in skulls. These were the methods by which Hitler proposed to make his nationalism, his socialism, and his promises to every group come true.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“Nationalism, said Hitler—echoing German thinkers from Fichte through Spengler—means the power of the nation over the individual in every realm, including economics; i.e., it means socialism. Socialism, he said, means rule by the whole, by the greatest of all wholes, Germany.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“The Nazis took over the essence of each side in the German debate and proudly offered the synthesis as one unified viewpoint. The synthesis is: national socialism.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“The German right characteristically denounced socialism, while supporting the welfare state, demanding government supervision of the economy, and preaching the duty of property-owners to serve their country. The German left characteristically denounced nationalism, while extolling the feats of imperial Germany, cursing the Allied victors of the war, and urging the rebirth of a powerful Fatherland. (Even the Communists soon began to substitute “nation” for “proletariat” in their manifestos.)”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“Power belongs to the whole. The individual serves it. The whole is sovereign. . . . Everyone is given his place. There are commands and obedience.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

“More than any other form of human expression, art is the barometer that lays bare a period’s view of reality, of life, of man.”
― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels