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The Ominous Parallels QUOTES

The Ominous Parallels QUOTES

1 " Man, Aristotle held, must first grasp the appropriate facts of reality; on this basis, he can then set the goals and course of his action. Pragmatism represents a total reversal of this progression. For the pragmatist, the order is: man acts; he invents forms of thought to satisfy the needs of his action; reality adapts itself accordingly (except when, inexplicably, it resists). First, action—second, thought—third, reality. "

― Leonard Peikoff , The Ominous Parallels

2 " The fundamental goal of education, writes Dewey, ”is the development of a spirit of social co-operation and community life....“ The goal is to foster the child’s ”social capacity“—by, among other things, ”saturating him with the spirit of service....“21 "

― Leonard Peikoff , The Ominous Parallels

3 " The best-known version of this view, the Existentialism of the fifties and sixties, held that reality is absurd and that irrational passion is the only means of knowledge. "

― Leonard Peikoff , The Ominous Parallels

4 " Racial subjectivism holds that a man’s inborn racial constitution determines his mental processes, his intellectual outlook, his thought patterns, his feelings, his conclusions—and that these conclusions, however well established, are valid only for members of a given race, who share the same underlying constitution. "

― Leonard Peikoff , The Ominous Parallels

5 " An interest,” writes Kant, “is present only in a dependent will which is not of itself always in accord with reason; in the divine will we cannot conceive of an interest. "

― Leonard Peikoff , The Ominous Parallels

6 " The nationalists, at heart, were socialists. The socialists, at heart, were nationalists. "

― Leonard Peikoff , The Ominous Parallels

7 " One British writer describes these big bankers and industrialists, who prided themselves on their “practicality” in backing Hitler, as “too innocent for politics.” William Shirer says that they were “politically childish.” In fact, their “innocence” was anti-intellectuality, and their “political childishness” was (in effect) philosophical pragmatism. "

― Leonard Peikoff , The Ominous Parallels

8 " When the country surrendered its educational institutions—in countless forms, direct and indirect, public and private, from nursery school on up—to the legion of Progressive educators spawned by Dewey, it formally delivered its youth into the hands of the philosophy of pragmatism, to be “reconstructed” according to the pragmatist image of man. "

― Leonard Peikoff , The Ominous Parallels

9 " Hegel would not have been possible but for Kant, who would not have been possible but for Plato. These three, more than any others, are the intellectual builders of Auschwitz. "

― Leonard Peikoff , The Ominous Parallels

10 " The defenders of capitalism spent their time broadcasting the vibrations of guilt and futility. Implicitly or explicitly, they were telling the country: human intelligence is impotent to control the course of society, men are helpless in the face of their own motivation, laissez-faire appeals to the evil in men, but men are stuck with it. "

― Leonard Peikoff , The Ominous Parallels

11 " To liberate humanity from intelligence, Hitler counted on the doctrines of irrationalism. To rid men of conscience, he counted on the morality of altruism. To free the world of freedom, he counted on the idea of collectivism "

― Leonard Peikoff , The Ominous Parallels

12 " When the Americans flocked to pragmatism, they believed that they were joining a battle to advance their essential view of reality and of life. They did not know that they were being marched in the opposite direction, that the battle had been calculated for a diametrically opposite purpose, or that the enemy they were being pushed to destroy was: themselves. "

― Leonard Peikoff , The Ominous Parallels

13 " The process of spreading a philosophy by means of free discussion among thinking adults is long and complex. From Plato to the present, it has been the dream of social planners to circumvent this process and, instead, to inject a controversial ideology directly into the plastic, unformed minds of children—by means of seizing a country’s educational system and turning it into a vehicle for indoctrination. In this way one may capture an entire generation without intellectual resistance, in a single coup d’école. "

― Leonard Peikoff , The Ominous Parallels

14 " Statism and the advocacy of reason are philosophical opposites. They cannot coexist—neither in a philosophic system nor in a nation. "

― Leonard Peikoff , The Ominous Parallels

15 " The deepest roots of this modern shift are twofold: in epistemology, the romanticist advocacy of feeling as superior to reason; in ethics, the altruist advocacy of others as superior to self. The result is a view of morality in which the ruling standard is: the feelings of others. "

― Leonard Peikoff , The Ominous Parallels

16 " Egoists hold that a man’s primary moral obligation is to achieve his own welfare (egoists do not necessarily agree on the nature of man’s welfare). "

― Leonard Peikoff , The Ominous Parallels

17 " If men uphold reason, they will be led, ultimately, to conclude that men should deal with one another as free agents, settling their disputes by an appeal to the mind, i.e., by a process of voluntary, rational persuasion. If men reject reason, they will be led, ultimately, to conclude the opposite: that men have no way to deal with one another at all—no way except physical force, wielded by an elite endowed with an allegedly superior, mystic means of cognition. "

― Leonard Peikoff , The Ominous Parallels

18 " The goal of the Progressive indoctrinators was not to impose a specific system of ideas on the student, but to destroy his capacity to hold any firm ideas, on any subject. "

― Leonard Peikoff , The Ominous Parallels

19 " Hegel’s form of collectivism is nationalism. "

― Leonard Peikoff , The Ominous Parallels

20 " They agree that the chosen have “absolute right” to smash the rest of mankind. They agree that might, being the expression of destiny, makes right. "

― Leonard Peikoff , The Ominous Parallels