Anatole

“Across Europe, fascism developed only in advanced democracies where the socialist left had become successful enough to frighten the middle classes. Fascism was in part a defensive reaction against the left by those who most feared it.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“German Protestants had theological and political reasons to dislike the Weimar Republic. They were inclined to take a pessimistic view of human nature and felt that only an authoritarian state could have the strength to correct human sinfulness. Such a state was God’s instrument, which meant that subversion or revolution amounted to working against God.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“I said, “Los Angeles burned but Los Angeles is but one city experiencing this kind of hopelessness and despair,” I said, “and we need a job program with stipends …” I said, “These young people really, ya know, are not in anybody’s statistics or data. They’ve been dropped off of everybody’s agenda. They live from grandmama to mama to girlfriend.” I said, “We now got young people who are twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two years old who have never worked a day of their lives.” I said, “These are the young people in our streets and they are angry and they are frustrated.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992