Top 883 Adolph Hitler Quotes & Sayings - Page 15

I think it was a big revelation to me earlier in my life that people who appear to be evil are actually not. In other words, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, "Yuck, yuck, yuck, I'm gonna be evil." I think even like Saddam Hussein or Hitler would wake up and say, "I think it's going to be a good day. I'm gonna do some really important work." And given their definition of good, they went out and did horrible things.

The Scriptures have been misused to defend bloody crusades and inquisitions; to support slavery, apartheid, and segregation; to sanction the physical and emotional abuse of women and children; to persecute Jews and other non-Christian people of faith; to support the holocaust of Hitler's Third Reich; to oppose medical science; to condemn inter-racial marriage; to execute women as witches; to excuse the violent racism of the Ku Klux Klan; to mobilize militias, white supremacy and neo-nazi movements; and to condone intolerance and discrimination against sexual minorities.

Many years later, after Niemöller had been imprisoned for eight years in concentration camps as the personal prisoner of Adolf Hitler, he penned these infamous words: First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionist, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew. And then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me.

Our faith in democracy, personal freedoms and human 'rights', and the other comforting prescriptions of the humanist liberal credo stem from the supremacy of maritime over territorial power. Pragmatists may deplore this as crude determinism, as another vain attempt to construct a general theory of history. They should reflect on the sort of political philosophy and structures we might now adhere to had the Habsburgs, Bourbons, Bonaparte, Hitler, Stalin or his heirs prevailed in the titanic world struggles of the past four centuries.

In the past 20 years alone, it adds up to more death than were caused by all the civil and international wars adn government repression of the entire twentieth century, the century of Hitler and Stalin. How much would we give to prevent those horrors? Yet how little are we doing to prevent today's even larger toll and all the misery that it involves? I believe that if you read this book to the end, and look honestly and carefully at our situation, assessing both the facts and the ethical arguments, you will agree that we must act.

Give people pride and they'll live on bread and water, bless their exploiters, and even die for them. Self-surrender is a transaction of barter: we surrender our sense of human dignity, our judgement, or moral and aesthetic sense for pride. If there is pride in being free, we are ready to die for liberty. If there is pride to be derived from an identification with a leader, we grovel in the dust before a Napoléon, Hitler or Stalin and are ready to die for him. If there is a distinction in suffering we search for martyrdom as for hidden treasure.

History's villains are more easily recognized in retrospect. In an article published in 1935 and reprinted in 1937, Winston Churchill expressed a curious ambivalence towards the German chancellor prior to the outbreak of war: We cannot tell whether Hitler will be the man who will once again let loose upon the world another war in which civilization will irretrievably succumb, or whether he will go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the great Germanic nation. . . .

Many of the principle weapons that the Nazis used during World War II had their first trial in combat in Spain - the Messerschmitt 109 fighter plane for example, the Stuka dive bomber, the 88 millimeter artillery piece, which could be used both for antiaircraft purposes and also shelling on the ground. And American soldiers were the victims of these things in Spain, American volunteers. So this war was really a testing ground for Hitler. And he learned a great deal from it about the strengths and weaknesses of these different weapons.

Someone wrote in the New York Times recently that if Donald Trump was allowed to go through with his plans, he'd become one of history's major human rights violators and ethnic cleansers, just below the Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin league. But people don't care. Trump goes on Jimmy Fallon's show and that spineless puff of a talk show host praises Trump for being such an "off the cuff" talker and providing "fresh air." Fresh air! What's fresh about racism? it comes out of the darkest dankest rottenest human cellar!

Once the war began, the government could do anything 'necessary' to win it; so it was with the 'final solution of the Jewish problem,' which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its 'necessities' gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it. The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong. And the people in Germany who, once the war had begun, still thought of complaining, protesting, resisting, were betting on Germany's losing the war. It was a long bet. Not many made it.

About 95% of the people listening to me agree with me. But I can continue to work with half or 30 or 20% of the audience hating me. In fact, one of the things I've had to do psychologically, in order to thrive, I've had to learn how to take being reviled and hated as a sign of success. Most people are not raised - I certainly wasn't - to want to be hated. I can only think maybe one or two people who were. Hitler. Maybe somebody else. Maybe Saddam.

After visiting these places, you can easily understand how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived. He had boundless ambition for his country which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way that he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him. He had in him the stuff of which legends are made.

I think in many ways, the Spanish Civil War was the first battle of World War II. After all, where else in the world at this point did you have Americans in uniform who were being bombed by Nazi planes four years before the U.S. entered World War II? Hitler and Mussolini jumped in on the side of Francisco Franco and his Spanish nationalists, sent them vast amounts of military aid, airplanes, tanks - and Mussolini sent 80,000 ground troops as well - because they wanted a sympathetic ally in power. So I think it really was the opening act of World War II.

Please, God,' Ruth would pray, 'don't let me be competitive. Let me realize what a privilege it is to study. Let me remember that knowledge must be pursued for its own sake and please, please stop me wanting to beat Verena Plackett in the exams.' She prayed hard and she meant what she said. But God was busy that autumn as the International Brigade came back, defeated, from Spain, Hitler's bestialities increased, and sparrows everywhere continued to fall.

Darwinism undermined traditional morality and the value of human life. Then, evolutionary progress became the new moral imperative. This aided the advance of eugenics, which was overtly founded on Darwinian principles. Some eugenicists began advocating euthanasia and infanticide for the disabled. On a parallel track, some prominent Darwinists argued that human racial competition and war is part of the Darwinian struggle for existence. Hitler imbibed these social Darwinist ideas, blended in virulent anti-Semitism, and--there you have it: Holocaust

Tayyip Erdogan wants to go beyond George W. Bush by making critical journalism and critics in the academy illegal. What will be the difference between him and a military government? Very little. I read his remarks on the effectiveness of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany. Well, yes. But then the AKP would have to ban all other political parties, close down all critical newspapers, burn the books critical of the regime and gas the Kurds to death...the final solution of the Kurdish 'problem.' Somehow I don't think he is about to do that.

Teller contended, not implausibly, that hydrogen bombs keep the peace, or at least prevent thermonuclear war, because the consequences of warfare between nuclear powers are now too dangerous. We haven't had a nuclear war yet, have we? But all such arguments assume that the nuclear-armed nations are and always will be, without exception, rational actors, and that bouts of anger and revenge and madness will never overtake their leaders (or military and secret police officers in charge of nuclear weapons). In the century of Hitler and Stalin, this seems ingenuous.

Anyone who clings to the historically untrue-and thoroughly immoral-doctrine that, 'violence never settles anything' I would advise to conjure the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedom.

...a very terrifying aspect of our society, and other societies, is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe [war and human suffering]. I think that's more terrifying than the occasional Hitler ...or other that crop up - these people would not able to operate were it not for this apathy and equanimity - and therefore I think that it is in some sense the sane and reasonable and tolerant people who should share a very serious burden of guilt, that they very easily throw on the shoulders of others who seem more extreme and more violent.

It was very depressing to realize that, when looking around for regimes that have systematically corrupted science within the past century or so, three stood out quite distinctly, head and shoulders above the rest of the herd: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and Bush’s America. At times when working on the three relevant chapters, I had to remind myself which chapter was the one in front of me: the parallels between the three regimes, in terms of their vigorous attempts to trample honest science underfoot, are as horrifically close as that.

Now at this very moment I knew that the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! ... How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care ... We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end ... Hitler's fate was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to a powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force.

Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free, and life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fall, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age... Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'

One of the most intensely unlikeable figures of the twentieth century, fanatical anti-Semite, enemy of labour unions and proud recipient of medals from Nazi Germany, where Hitler held him in veneration, Henry Ford was also an employer who paid his workers more than his competitors, an innovator who pioneered the assembly line and a visionary whose part in the creation of the twentieth century was so great that Aldous Huxley, in his Brave New World, prefigured a society whose calendar was divided into BF and AF-Before Ford and After Ford.

There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing. Everybody now-a-days is a father, there is father Mussolini and father Hitler and father Roosevelt and father Stalin and father Trotsky and father Blum and father Franco is just commencing now and there are ever so many more ready to be one. Fathers are depressing. England is the only country now that has not got one and so they are more cheerful there than anywhere. It is a long time now that they have not had any fathering and so their cheerfulness is increasing.

The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as Displaced Persons as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog. Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire. I've found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes.

Just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody, "Thou shalt not kill," even though man's natural desires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitler's land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: "Thou shalt kill," although the organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people. Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it - the quality of temptation.

I think one day Madonna's going to say Jesus is Lord, one day Muhammad is going to say Jesus is Lord, Hitler will say Jesus is Lord.

This is the first time in history that a war has involved the whole world, and also it may last many years more; this thought is soul-shattering for all of us as human beings. It is horrible to think that the crimes committed by this one man Hitler have these many years been destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands and millions, and one would despair entirely were it not certain that the majority, the innumerable majority which opposes him openly or secretly, will succeed in wiping out once and for all him and his.

Some European countries insist on saying that during World War II, Hitler burned millions of Jews and put them in concentration camps. Any historian, commentator or scientist who doubts that is taken to prison or gets condemned. Although we don't accept this claim, if we suppose it is true... If the Europeans are honest they should give some of their provinces in Europe - like in Germany, Austria or other countries - to the Zionists and the Zionists can establish their state in Europe. You offer part of Europe and we will support it.

But if we come back, if German men come back, if British men come back, and Japs, and French, and all the other men, all of us talking, writing, painting, making movies of heroes, and cockroaches and foxholes and blood, then future generations will always be doomed to future Hitlers. It's never occurred to boys to have contempt for wars, to point to soldiers' pictures in history books, laughing at them. If German boys had learned to be contemptuous of violence, Hitler would have had to take up knitting to keep his ego warm.

I saw the most frightening, most depressing sight I had ever seen - a row of stores with Stars of David and the word 'Jude' painted on them, and inside, behind half-empty counters, people in a daze, cringing like they didn't know what hit them and didn't know where the next blow would come from. Hitler had been in power only six months, and his boycott was already in full effect. I hadn't been so wholly conscious of being a Jew since my bar mitzvahs, and it was the first time since I'd had the measles that I was too sick to eat.

I never thought I'd get to see Rome," Hazel said. "When I was alive, I mean for the first time, Mussolini was in charge. We were at war." "Mussolini?" Leo frowned. "Wasn't he like BFF's with Hitler?" Hazel stared at him like he was an alien. "BFF's?" "Never mind." "I'd love to see the Trevi Fountain," she said. "There's a fountain on every block," Leo grumbled. "Or the Spanish Steps," Hazel said. "Why would you come to Italy to see Spanosh steps?" Leo asked. "That's like going to China for Mexican food, isn't it?" "You're hopeless," Hazel complained. "So I've been told.

Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand [the Holocaust] is almost to justify...no normal human being will ever be able to identify with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Eichmann, and endless others. This dismays us, and at the same time gives us a sense of relief, because perhaps it is desirable that their words (and also, unfortunately, their deeds) cannot be comprehensible to us. They are non-human words and deeds, really counter-human.

I think David Yates was just like, "You've got on with it for a few years, I'm gonna let you off the hook." And also, I think it's because the action side of stuff that we were doing, it was going to be very difficult to do all that with all the prosthetics on. It was gonna be hard work, and I think they just said, "You know what?" I think they put a level of trust in me, as well. They said, "You know, we're gonna let Neville Longbottom lose the fat suit, lose the teeth, lose the Adolf Hitler hair."

In the first few pages, Kundera discusses several abstract historical figures: Robespierre, Nietzsche, Hitler. For Eunice's sake, I wanted him to get to the plot, to introduce actual "living" characters - I recalled this was a love story - and to leave the world of ideas behind. Here we were, two people lying in bed, Eunice's worried head propped on my collarbone, and I wanted us to feel something in common. I wanted this complex language, this surge of intellect, to be processed into love. Isn't that how they used to do it a century ago, people reading poetry to one another?

There is no independence of law against National Socialism. Say to yourselves at every decision which you make: "How would the Führer decide in my place?" In every decision ask yourselves: "Is this decision compatible with the National Socialist conscience of the German people?" Then you will have a firm iron foundation which, allied with the unity of the National Socialist People's State and with your recognition of the eternal nature of the will of Adolf Hitler, will endow your own sphere of decision with the authority of the Third Reich, and this for all time.

No liberal newspaper ever talked about the invasion of Vietnam; they talked about the defense of Vietnam. And then they were saying, "well, it's not going well." Ok, that make them liberal. It's like, it's if we were to say, that going back to, say, Nazi Germany, that Hitler's general staff was liberal after Stalingrad because they were criticizing his tactics: "It was a mistake to fight a two front war, we should've knocked off Englad first," or something.

Certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain... Hitler, because in his joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life.

Let's try to find ten good things to say about Albert Belle: 10. So far as we know, he's never killed anyone. 9. He is handsome, and built like a God. 8. He played every game. 7. He has never appeared on the Jerry Springer Show. 6. He was an underrated base runner who was rarely caught stealing. 5. He hasn't been arrested in several years. 4. He is very bright. 3. He works hard. 2. He has never spoken favorably about Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, or any other foreign madman. 1. The man could hit.

When all this is over, people will try to blame the Germans alone, and the Germans will try to blame the Nazis alone, and the Nazis will try to blame Hitler alone. They will make him bear the sins of the world. But it's not true. You suspected what was happening, and so did I. It was already too late over a year ago. I caused a reporter to lose his job because you told me to. He was deported. The day I did that I made my little contribution to civilization, the only one that matters.

What must it be like to live in Rush Limbaughs world? A world where when anyone other than conservative, white men attempts to do anything or enter any profession, be it business, politics, art or sports, the only reason theyre allowed entry or, incredibly, attain excellence is because the standard was lowered. Be they liberals, people of color, women, the poor or anyone with an accent.... Edgy, controversial, brilliant. What a way to shake up intelligent sports commentary. Hitler would have killed in talk radio. He was edgy, too.

Not only is the Napoleonic dream stronger today in our imaginations than it has ever been, but one can already feel the slow falling away of moral opprobrium from our memory of Hitler. In another fifty years we may well find ourselves weighed down by a second monstrous dream of pure grandeur to match that of the Emperor. Two men who dared. Two men who were adored. Two men who led with brilliance. Two men who administered fairly and efficiently. Two men who were modest in their own needs but surrounded by lesser beings who profited from their situation and came between the Hero and the people.

Hitler appeared, a man with limited intellectual abilities and unfit for any useful work, bursting with envy and bitterness against all whom circumstance and nature had favored over him....In his desperate ambition for power he discovered that his speeches, confused and pervaded with hate as they were, received wild acclaim by those whose situation and orientation resembled his own. He picked up this human flotsam on the streets and in the taverns and organized them around himself. This is the way he launched his political career.