Michael Burleigh > Quotes

“Cruelty lurks in our instincts, and fanaticism is a camouflage for cruelty. Fanatics are seldom genuinely humane, and those who sincerely dread cruelty will be slow to adopt a fanatical creed. . . .”
― Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History

“It helped that municipal employees tore down opposition posters, and that the only independent pollster, Levada, was closed down two weeks before the election.”
― Michael Burleigh, The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: A History of Now

“Modern armies are obsessed with the military learning cycle, of learning from past ‘best practice’ and mistakes. The problem is which part of the past provides the lessons.”
― Michael Burleigh

“The lesson, for our time, is that one should be careful to learn the lesson from the right phase of any earlier campaign, rather than imagining that what you prefer to do in the present worked like magic in the past. Was the Malayan Emergency really won through ‘hearts and minds’ and the herculean efforts of a charismatic general? Or did victory result from prior establishment of population and spatial dominance through military force, with hearts-and-minds warfare as a parenthesis before the democratic co-option of Chinese elites?”
― Michael Burleigh, Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965

“came out favourably.176 Bonhoeffer exuded optimism”
― Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History