Hope

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.”
― Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45

“It was a freedom that understood what it was against but not what it was for, a malnourished and mean kind of freedom that kept you out of chains but did not provide bread or shelter or a means to get ahead.”
― Matthew Desmond, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“History has shown that few of us who benefit from the order of things are willing to compromise what we have for the good of the whole.”
― Julietta Singh, The Breaks: An Essay

“Thus Nazism, as it proceeded from practice to theory, had to deny expertness in thinking and then (this second process was never completed), in order to fill the vacuum, had to establish expert thinking of its own—that is, to find men of inferior or irresponsible caliber whose views conformed dishonestly or, worse yet, honestly to the Party line. The nonpolitical pastor satisfied Nazi requirements by being nonpolitical. But the nonpolitical schoolmaster was, by the very virtue of being nonpolitical, a dangerous man from the first. He himself would not rebel, nor would he, if he could help it, teach rebellion; but he could not help being dangerous—not if he went on teaching what was true. In order to be a theory and not just a practice, National Socialism required the destruction of academic independence.”
― Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45