From the Harvest Books paperback edition
"The supranationalism of the antisemites approached the question of international organization from eactly the opposite point of view. Their Aim was a dominating superstructure which would destroy all home-grown nationalist structures alike. They could indulge in hypernationalistic talk even as they prepared to destroy the body politic of their own nation, because tribal nationalism, with its immoderate lust for conquest, was one of the principal powers by which to force open the narrow and moset limits of the nation-state and its sovereignty." (41)
"Only two decades separated the temporary decline of the antisemitic movements from the outbreak of the first World War. This period has been adequately described as a 'Golden Age of Security' because only a few who lived in it felt the inherent weakness of an obviously outmoded political structure which, despite all prophecies of imminent doom, continued to function in spurious splendor and with an inexplicable, monotonous stubbornness...None of these governments was especially popular, and all faced growing domestic opposition; but nowhere did there seem to exist an earnest political will for radical change in political conditions. Europe was much too busy expanding economically fo any nation or social stratum to take political questions seriously. Everything could go on because nobody cared." (51)
"The theatrical quality of the political world had become so patent that the theater could appear as the realm of reality." (51)
"Not only were [the Jews] faced with the demoralizing demand that they be exceptions to their own people, recognizing 'the sharp difference between them and the other' ans ask that such 'separation...be also legalized' by the governments; they were expected even to become exceptional speciments of humanity." (58)
"Conforming to a society which discriminated against 'ordinary' Jews and in which, at the same time, it was generally easier for an educated Jew to be admitted to fashionable circles than for a non-Jew of a similar condition, Jews had to indicate that they were Jews; under no circumstances were they allowed simply to disappear among their neighbors. In order to rationalize the ambiguity which they themselves did not fully understand, they might pretend to be 'a mand in the street and a Jew at home.' This actually amounted to a feeling of being different from other men in the street because they were Jews, and different from other Jews because they were not like 'ordinary Jews.'" (65)
"Each society demands of its members a certain amount of acting, the ability to present, represent and act what one actually is. When society disintegrates into cliques such demands are no longer made of the individual but of members of cliques. Behavrion then is controlled by silent demands and not by indvidiual capacitiyes, exactly as an actor's performance must fit into the ensemble of all other roles in the play." (85)
"The refusal of the state to democratize the army and to subject it to the civil authorities entailed remarkable consequences. It made the army an entity outside of the nation and created an armed power whose loyalties could be turned in directions which none could foretell." (100)
"If it is the common error of our time to imagine that propaganda can achieve all things and that a man can be talked into anything provided that the talking is sufficiently loud and cunning, in that period [Dreyfus Affair] it was commonly believed that 'the voice of the people was the voice of God', and that the task of a leader was, as Clemenceau so scornfully expressed it, to follow that voice shrewdly. Both views go back to the same fundamental error of regarding the mob as identical with rather than as a caricature of the people." (107)
"The mob is primarily a group in which the residue of all classes are represnted. This makes it so easy to mistake the mob for the people, which also comprises all strata of society. While the people in all great revolutions fight for true representation, the mob always will should for the 'strong man', the 'great leader.' For the mob hates society from which it is excluded, as well as Parliament where it is not represented." (107)
"The disturbing thing about the Dreyfus Affair is that it was not only the mob which had to work along extraparlimentary lines. The entire minority, fighting as it was for Parliament, democracy, and the republic, was likewise constrained to wage its battle outside the Chamber. The only difference between the two elements was that while the one used the streets, the other resorted to the press and the courts. In other words, the whole of France's political life during the Dreyfus affair was carried on outside Parliament." (115)
"But we also admit a certain nostalgia for what can still be called a 'golden age of security' for an age, that is, when even horrors were still marked by a certain moderation and controlled by respectability, and therefore cold be related to the general appearance of sanity. In other words, no matter how close to us this past is, we are perfectly aware that our eperience of concetration camps and eathe factories is as remote from its general atmosphere as it is from any other period in Western history." (123)
"The bourgeiosie succeeded in destroying the nation-state but won a Pyrrhic victory; the mob proved quite capable of taking care of politics by itself and liquidated the bourgeoisie along with all other classes and institutions." (124)
"Expansion as a permanent and supreme aim of politics is the central political idea of imperialism." (125)
"Of all forms of government and organizations of people, the nation-state is least suited for unlimited growth because the genuine consent at its base cannot be stretched indefinitely, and is only rarely, and with difficulty, won from conquered peoples." (126)
"Imperialism is not empire building and expansion is not conquest." (130)
"What imperialists actually wanted was expansion of political power without the foundation of a body politic. Imperialist expansion had been touched off by a curious kind of economic crisis, the overproduction of capital and the emergence of 'superfluous' money, the result of oversaving, which could no longer find productive investment within the national borders." (135)
"Only through the expansion of the national instruments of violence could the foreign-investment movement be rationalized, and the wild speculations with superfluous capital, which had provoked gambling of all savings, be reintegrated into the economic system of the nation. The state expanded its power because, given the choice between greater losses than the economic body of any country could sustain and greater gains than any people left to its own devices would have dreamed of, it could only choose the latter." (136)
"The state-employed adminsitrators of violence soon formed a new classs within the nations and, although their field of activity was far away from the mother country, wielded an imporant influence on the body politic at home. Since they were actually nothing but functionaries of violence they could only think in terms of power politics. They were the first who, as a class, and supprted by their everyday experience, would claim that power is the essence of every political structure." (137)
"The new feature of this imperialist political philosophy is not the predominant place it gave violence, nor the discovery that power is one of the basic political realities. Violence has always been the ultima ratio in political action and power has always been the visible expression of rule and government. But neither had ever before been the conscious aim of the body politic or the ultimate goal of any definite policy. For power left to itself can achieve nothing but more power, and violence administered for power's (and not for law's) sake turns into a destructive principle that will not stop until there is nothing left to violate." (137)
"But the resulting introduction of power as the only content of politics, and of expansion as its only aim, would hardly have met with such universal applause, nor would the resulting dissolution of the nation's body politics have met with so little opposition, had it not so perfectly answered the hidden desires and secret convictions of the economically and socially dominant classes. The bourgeioisie, so long excluded from government by the nation-state and by their own lack of interest in public affairs, was politically emancipated by imperialism." (138)
"[The bourgeiosie's] privateness and primary concern with money-making had developed a set of behavior patterns which are expressed in all those proverbs--'nothing succeeds like success', 'might is right', 'right is expediency, etc.'--that necessarily spring from the experience of a society of competitiors. When, in an era of imperialism, businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of successful businessment and 'thought in continents', these private practices and devices were gradually transformed into rules and principles for the conduct of public affairs." (138)
"Hobbes' Man owes no loyalty to his country if it has been defeated and he is excused for every treachery if he happens to be taken prisoner." (140)
"Thus membership in any form of community is for Hobbes a temporary and limited affair which essentially does not change the solitary and private character of the individual (who 'has no pleasure, but on the contrary a great deal of griefe in keeping company, where there is no power to over-awe them all') or create permanent bonds between him and his fellow-men. It seems as though Hobbes' picture of man defeats his purpose of providing the basis for a Commonwealth and gives instead a consistent pattern of attitudes through which every genuine community can easily be destroyed." (140)
"Since power is essentially only a means to an end a community based solely on power must decay in the calm of order and stability; its complete securty reveals that it is built on sand. Only by acquiring more power can it guarantee the status quo; only by constantly extending its authority and only through the process of power accumulation can it remain stable." (142)
"The most radical and the only secure form of possession is destruction, for only what we have destroyed is safely and forever ours. Property owners who do not consume but strive to enlarge their holdings continually find one very inconvenient limitation, the unfortunate face that men must die. Death is the real reason why propery and acquisition can never become a true political principle." (145)
"The amswer to the fateful question: why did the European comity of nations allow this evil to spread until everything was destroyed, the good as well as the bad, is that all governments knew very well that their countries were secretly disintegrating, that the body politic was being destroyed from within, and that they lived on borrowed time." (147)
"In Marxist terms the new phenomenon of an alliance between the mob and capital seemed so unnatural, so obviously in conflict with the doctrine of class struggle, that the actual dangers of the imperialist attempt--to divide mankind into master races and slave races, into higher and lower breeds, into colored peoples and white men, all of which were attempts to unify the people on the basis of the mob--were completely overlooked. Even the breakdown of international solidarity at the outbreak of the first World War did not disturb the complacency of the socialists and their faith in the proletariat as such. Socialists were still probing the economic laws of imperialism when imperliasts had long since stopped obeying them, when in overseas countries these laws had been sacrificed to the 'imperial factor' or to the 'race factor', and when only a few elderly gentlement in high finance still believed in the inalienable rights of the profit rate." (152)
"In theory, there is an abyss between nationalism and imperialism; in practice, it can and has been bridged by tribal nationalism and outright racism. From the beginning, imperialists in all countries preaced and boasted of their being 'beyond the parties', and the only ones to speak for the nation as a whole." (153)
"...what the historians, sadly preoccupied with the phenomenon [of the mob] itself, failed to grasp was that the mob could not be identified with the growing industrial working class, and certainly not with the people as a whole, but that it was composed actually of the refuse of all classes. This composition made it seem that the mob and its representatives had abolished class differences, that those standing outside the class-divided nation (the Volksgemeinschaft, as the Nazis would call it) rather than its distortion and caricature." (155)
"What [historians] failed to understand was that the mob is not only the refuse but also the by-product of bourgeois society, directly produced by it and therefore never quite separable from it. They failed for this reason to notice high society's constantly growing admiration for the underworld, which runs like a red thread through the nineteenth century, its continuous step-by-step retreat on all questions of morality, and its growing taste for the anarchical cynicism of its offspring." (155)
"Historically speaking, racists have a worse record of patriotism than the representatives of all other international ideologies together, and they were the only ones who consistently denied the great principle upon which political organizations of poeples are built, the principle of equality and solidarity of all peoples guaranteed by the idea of mankind." (161)
"Political romanticism has been accused of inventing race-thinking, as it has been and could be accused of inventing every other possible irresponsible opinion." (167)
"This inherent cynicism of romantic personality-worship has made possible certain modern attitudes among intellectuals. They were fairly well represented by Mussolini, one of the last heirs of this movement, when he described himself at the same time 'aristocrat and democrat, revolutionary and reactionary, proletarian and antiproletarian, pacifist and antipacifist.' The ruthless individualism of romanticism never meant anything more serious than 'everybody is free to create for himself his own ideology.' What was new in Mussolini's experiment was the 'attempt to carry it out with all possible energy.'" (168)
"The difference [in the superfluous men] was not their morality or immorality, but rather that the decision to join this crowd 'of all nations and colors' was no longer up to them; that they had not stepped out of society but had been spat out by it; that they were not enterprising beyond the permitted limits of civilization but simply victims without use or function." (189)
"The point, however, is that no matter whether racism appears as the natural result of a catastrophe or as the conscious instrument for bringing it about, it is always closely tied to contempt for labor, hatred of territorial limitation, general rootlessness, and an activistic faith in one's own divine choseness." (197)
"South Africa's race society taught the mob the great lesson of which it had always had a confused premonition, that through sheer violence an underprivileged groupp could create a class lower than itself, that for this purpose it did not even need a revolution but could band together with groups of the ruling classes, and that foreign peoples offered the best opportunities for such tactics." (206)
"Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own people is surrounded by 'a world of enemies', 'one against all', that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man." (227)
"The appeal of tribal isolation and master race ambitions was partly due to an instinctive feeling that mankind, whether a religious or humanistic ideal, implies a common sharing of responsibility. The shrinking of geographic distances made this a political actuality of the first order...Tribalism and racism are the very realistic, if very destructive, ways of escaping this predicament of common responsibility. Their metaphysical rootlessness, which matched so well the territorial uprootedness of the nationalities it furst seized, was equally well suited to the needs of the sifting masses of modern cities and was therefore grasped at once by totalitarianism..." (235-6)
"The hatred of the racists against the Jews sprang from a superstituous apprehension that it actually might be the Jews, and not themselves, whom God had chosen, to whom success was granted by divine providence. There was an element of feeble-minded resentment against a people who, it was feared, had received a rationally incomprehensible guarantee that they would emerge eventually, and in spired of appearances, as the final victors in world history." (242)
"The slogan 'above the parties', the appeal to 'men of all parties', and the boast that they would 'stand far removed from the strife of parties and represent only a national purpose' was equally characteristic of all imperialist groups, where it appeared as a natural consequence of their exclusive interest in foreign policy in which the nation was supposed to act as a whole in any event, independent of classes and parties." (250)
"Even though the totalitarian movements and their predecessors, the pan-movements, were not 'parties above parties' aspiring to seize the state machine but movements aiming at the destruction of the state, the Nazis found it very convenient to pose as such, that is, to pretend to follow faithfully the Italian model of Fascism. Thus they could win the help of those upper-class and business elite who mistook the Nazis for the older groups they had themselves frequently initiated and which had made only the rather modest pretense of conquering the state machine for one party. The businessmen who helped Hitler into power naively believed that they were only supporting a dictator, and one of their own making, who would naturally rule to the advantage of their own class and the disadvantage of all others." (257)
"It is now conveniently forgotten that at the moment of the outbreak of the second World War, the majority of European countries had already adopted some form of dictatorship and discarded the party system, and that this revolutionary change in government had been effected in most countries without revolutionary upheaval." (263)
"For in the face of the movements, the differences between the [German] parties had indeed become quite meaningless; the existence of all of them was at stake [in the 1932 presidential elections] and consequently they banded together and hoped to maintain a status quo that guaranteed their existence." (264)
"Behind the curious uniformity of [campaign] method used by the supporters of all the candidates lay the tacit assumptin that the electorate would go to the polls because it was frightened--afraid of the Communists, afraid of the Nazis, or afraid of the status quo." (265)
"Before totalitarian politics consciously attacked and partially destroyed the very structure of European civilization, the explosion of 1914 and its severe consequences of instability had sufficiently shattered the facade of Europe's political system to lay bare its hidden frame. Such visible exposures were the sufferings of more and more groups of people to whom suddenly the rules of the world around them had ceased to apply." (267)
"The second great shock that the European world suffered through the arrival of refugees was the realization that it was impossible to get rid of them or transform them into nationals of the country of refuge." (281)
"Not only were people expelled from country and citizenship, but more and more persons of all countries, including the Western democracies, volunteered to fight in civil wars abroad (something which up to then only a few idealsits or adventurers had done) even when this meant cutting themselves off from their national communities. This was the less of the Spanish Civil War and one of the reasons why the governments were so frightened by the International Brigade." (282)
"Every attempt by international conferences to establish some legal status for stateless people failed because no agreement could possibly replace the territory to which an alien, within the framework of existing law, must be deportable. All discussions about the refugree problems revolved around this one question: How can the refugee be made deportable again?" (284)
"On the contrary, like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people. And what happened in Palestine within the smallest territory and in terms of hundreds of thousands was then repeated in India on a large scale involving many millions of people. Since the Peace Treaties of 1919 and 1920 the refugees and the stateless have attached themselves like a curse to all the newly established states on earth which were created in the image of the nation-state. For these new states this curse bears the germs of a deadly sickness. For the nation-state cannot exist once its principle of equality before the law has broken down. Without this legal equality, which originally was designed to replace the older laws and orders of the feudal society, the nation dissolves into an anarchic mass of over-and underprivileged indivisuals. Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states. The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them." (290)
"For the propaganda of totalitarian movements which precede and accompany totalitarian regimes is invariably as frank as it is mendacious, and would-be totalitarian rules usually start their careers by boasting of their past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones." (307)
"Totalitarian movements are possible wherever there are masses who for one reason or another have acquired the appetite for political organization. Masses are not held together by a conscioussness of common interest and they lack that specific class articulateness which is epxressed in determined, limited, and obtainable goals. The term masses applies only where we deal with people who either because of sheer numbers, or indifference, or a combination of both, cannot be integrated into any organization based on common interest, into political parties or municipal governments or professional organizations or trade unions. Potentially, they exist in every country and form the majority of those large numbers of neutral, politically indifferent people who never join a party and hardly ever go to the polls." (311)
"...the majority of [Nazi] membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods of political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been 'spolied' by the party system." (312)
"The truth is that the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant lineliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class. The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships." (317)
"The totalitarian movements, each in its own way, have done their utmost to get rid of the party programs which specified concrete content and which they inherited from earlier, nontotalitarian stages of development. No matter how radically they might have been phrased, every definite political goal which does not simply assert or circumscribe the claim to world rule, every political program which deals with issues more specific than 'ideological questions of importance for centuries' is an obstruction to totalitarianism." (324)
"Lack of or ignoring of a party program is by itself not necessarily a sign of totalitarianism. The first to consider programs and platforms as needless scraps of paper and embarrassing promises, inconsistent with the style and impetus of a movement, was Mussolini with his Fascist pohilsophy of activism and inspiration through the historical moment itself." (325)
"Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within." (325)
"...when the smugness of spurious respectability gave way to anarchic despair seemed the first great opportunity for the elite as well as the mob. This is obvious for the new mass leaders whose careers reproduce the features of earlier mob leaders: failure in professional and social life, perversion and disaster in private life. The fact that their lives prior to their political careers had been failures, naively held against them by the more respectable leaders of the old parties, was the strongest factor in their mass appeal." (327)
"The temporary alliance between the elite and the mob rested largely on this genuine delight with which the former watched the latter destroy respectability." (333)
"In this sense, the bourgeoisie's political philosophy was always 'totalitarian': it always assumed an identity of politics, economics, and society, in which political institutions served only as the facade for private interests." (336)
"Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty." (339)
"In order not to overestimate the imporance of the propaganda lies one should recall the much more numerous instances in which Hitler was completely sincere and brutally unequivocal in the definition of the movement's true aims, btu they were simply not acknowledged by a public unprepared for such consistency." (343)
"Propaganda, in other words, is one, and possibly the most important, instrument of totalitarianism for dealing with the nontotalitarian world; terror, on the contrary, is the very essence of its form of government." (344)
"The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error. The assumption of infallibility, moreover, is based not so much on superior intelligence as on the correct interpretation of the essentially reliable forces in history or nature, forces which neither defeat nor ruin can prove wrong because they are bound to assert themselves in the long run. Mass leaders in power have one concern which overrules all utilitarian considerations: to make their predictions come true." (349)
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it." (350)
"The masses' escape from reality is a verdict against the world in which they are forced to live and in which they cannot exist, since coincidence has become its supreme master and human beings need the constant transformation of chaotic and accidental conditions into a man-made pattern of relative consistency...Totalitarian propaganda can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity." (352)
"It is interesting that even in their beginnings the Nazis were prudent enough never to use slogans which, like democracy, republic, dictatorship, or monarchy, indicated a specific form of government. It is as though, in this one matter, they had always known that they would be entirely original. Every discussion about the actual form of their future government could be dismissed as empty talk about mere formalities--the state, according to Hitler, being only a 'means' for the conservation of the race, as the state, according to Bolshevik propaganda, is only an instrument in the stuggle of classes." (357)
"The members of totalitarian movements, utterly fanatical as long as the movement exists, will not follow the example of religious fanatics and die the death of martyrs (even though they were only too willing to die the death of robots). Rather they will quietly give up the movement as a bad bet and look around for another promising fiction or wait until the former fiction regains enough strength to establish another mass movement." (363)
On front organizations: "An anonymity which contributes greatly to the weirdness of the whole phenomenon clouds the beginnings of this new organizational structure." (365)
"The front organizations surround the movement's membership with a protective wall which separates them from the outside, normal world; at the same time, they form a bridge back into normalcy, without which the numbers in the prepower stage would feel too sharply the differences between their beliefs and those of normal people, between the lying fictiousness of their own and the reality of the normal world." (366)
"The world at large, on the other side, usually gets its first glimpse of a totalitarian movement through its front organizations. The sympathizers, whic are to all appearances still innocuous fellow-citizens in a nontotalitarian society, can hardly be called single-minded fanatics; through them, the movements make their fantastic lies more generally acceptable, can spread their propaganda in milder, more respectable form, until the whole atmosphere is poisoned with totalitarian elements which are hardly recognizable as such but appear to be normal politial reactions or opinions." (367)
"[The Leader's] position with [his] intimate circule depends upon his ability to spin intrigues among its membership and upon his skill in constantly changing its personnel." (373)
"A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true...The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people belive the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness." (382)
"The totalitarian system, unfortunately, is foolproof for against such normal consequences; its ingeniousness rests precisely on the elimination of that reality which either unmasks the liar or forces him to live up to his pretense." (384)
"The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never comapres the lies with reality." (385)
"Power means a direct confrontation with reality, and totalitarianism in power is constantly concerned with overcoming this challenge. Propaganda and organization no longer suffice to assert that the impossible is possible, that the incredible is true, that an insane consistency rules the world; the chief psychological support of totalitarian fiction--the active resntment of the status quo, which the masses refused to accept as the only possible world--is no longer there; every bit of factual information that leaks through the iron curtain, set up against the ever-threatening flood of reality from the other, nontotalitarian side, is a greater menace to totalitarian domination than counterpropaganda has been to totalitarian movements." (392)
"If we consider the totalitarian state solely as an instrument of power and leave aside questions of administrative efficiency, industrial capacity, and economic productivity, then its shapelessness turns out to be an ideally suited instrument for the realization of the so-called Leader principle." (404)
"The reason why the ingenious devices of totalitarian rule, with their absolute and unsurpassed concentration of power in the hands of a single man, were never tried out before, is that no ordinary tyrant was ever mad enough discard all limited and local interests--economic, national, human, military--in favor of a purely ficticious reality in some indefinite distant future." (412)
"In a system of ubiquitous spying, where everybody may be a police agent and each individual feels himself under constant surveillance; under circumstances, moreover, where careers are extremely insecure and where the most spectacular ascents and falls have become everyday occurrences, every word becomes equivocal and subject to retrospective 'interpretation.'" (431)
Example of the Okhrana, p. 433? Secret police/big data come back to this later
"The reason why the totalitarian regimes can get so far toward realizing a ficticious, topsy-turvy world is that the outside nontotalitarian world, which always comprises a great part of the population of the totalitarian country itself, indugles also in wishful thinking and shirks reality in the face of real insanity just as much as the masses do in the face of the normal world. This common-sense disinclination to believe the monstrous is constantly strengthened by the totalitarian ruler himself, who makes sure that no reliable statistics, no controllable facts and figures are ever published, so that there are only subjective, uncontrollable, and unreliable reports about the places of the living dead." (437)
"Totalitarian terror achieved its most terrible triumph when it succeeded in cutting the moral person off from the individualist escape and in making the decisions of conscience absolutely questionable and equivocal. When a man is faced with the alternative of betraying and thus murdering his friends or of sending his wife and children, for whom he is in every sense responsible, to their death; when even suicide would mean the immediate murder of his own family--how is he to decide? The alternative is no longer between good and evil, but between murder and murder." (452)
"Totalitarian domination, like tyranny, bears the germs of its own destruction....Nevertheless, organized loneliness is considerably more dangerous than the unorganized impotence of all those who are ruled by the tyrannical and arbitrary will of a single man. Its danger is that it threatens to ravage the world as we know it--a world which everywhere seems to have come to an end--before a new beginning rising from this end has had time to assert itself." (478)