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41 " It is obvious, therefore, why Nazi (and Fascist) leaders insist on faith from their followers. “Faith,” writes Hitler, is harder to shake than knowledge, love succumbs less to change than respect, hate is more enduring than aversion, and the impetus to the mightiest upheavals on this earth has at all times consisted less in a scientific knowledge dominating the masses than in a fanaticism which inspired them and sometimes in a hysteria which drove them forward.12 "
― Leonard Peikoff , The Ominous Parallels
42 " Contrary to the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee and run the nation’s economy. The issue of legal ownership, they explained, is secondary; what counts is the issue of control. Private citizens, therefore, may continue to hold titles to property—so long as the state reserves to itself the unqualified right to regulate the use of their property. "
43 " The German right characteristically denounced socialism, while supporting the welfare state, demanding government supervision of the economy, and preaching the duty of property-owners to serve their country. The German left characteristically denounced nationalism, while extolling the feats of imperial Germany, cursing the Allied victors of the war, and urging the rebirth of a powerful Fatherland. (Even the Communists soon began to substitute “nation” for “proletariat” in their manifestos.) "
44 " The Nazis took over the essence of each side in the German debate and proudly offered the synthesis as one unified viewpoint. The synthesis is: national socialism. "
45 " Nationalism, said Hitler—echoing German thinkers from Fichte through Spengler—means the power of the nation over the individual in every realm, including economics; i.e., it means socialism. Socialism, he said, means rule by the whole, by the greatest of all wholes, Germany. "
46 " Philosophy is the study of the nature of existence, of knowledge, and of values. "
47 " The branch of philosophy that studies existence is metaphysics. "
48 " The first major step was the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State, promulgated (by the aged Hindenburg) on February 28, 1933. This decree abrogated individual rights in Germany. Restrictions on personal liberty [the decree stated], on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications; and warrants for house searchers, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.1 "
49 " The branch of philosophy that studies knowledge is epistemology. "
50 " The branch of philosophy that studies values is ethics (or morality), which rests on both the above branches—on a view of the world in which man acts, and of man’s nature, including his means of knowledge. "
51 " The branch of philosophy that applies ethics to social questions is politics, which studies the nature of social systems and the proper functions of government. "
52 " Special government bodies were created to control—according to the requirements of “the public interest”—every aspect of literature, music, the fine arts, the theater, the movies, radio, and the press. Hundreds of tons of books were destroyed; the Marxists and the cultural modernists (and several other groups) had done their job; Hitler had no further need for anarchy and subversion of the system. The Churches were not regarded as subversive; though harassed and intimidated, they were allowed to function. "
53 " The Nazi formations were trained to vent fury and sow terror—to break up meetings of opponents, to administer beatings, provoke street fights, stage riots, mutilate bodies, kick in skulls. These were the methods by which Hitler proposed to make his nationalism, his socialism, and his promises to every group come true. "
54 " The root cause of Nazism lies in a power that most people ignore, disparage—and underestimate. The cause is not the events hailed or cursed in headlines and street rallies, but the esoteric writings of the professors who, decades or centuries earlier, laid the foundation for those events. "
55 " The children declared that they would never speak of ‘I’ but only of ‘we.’ ”2 "
56 " three major philosophers who, above all others, are responsible for generating the disease of collectivism and transmitting it to the dictators of our century. The three are: Plato—Kant—Hegel. (The antidote to them is: Aristotle.) "
57 " In accordance with the method of “German socialism,” the facade of a market economy was retained. All prices, wages, and interest rates, however, were “fixed by the central authority. They [were] prices, wages, and interest rates in appearance only; in reality they [were] merely determinations of quantity relations in the government’s orders.... This is socialism in the outward guise of capitalism. "
58 " Aristotle is the champion of this world, the champion of nature, as against the supematuralism of Plato. "
59 " Aristotle maintains that there is only one reality: the world of particulars in which we live, the world men perceive by means of their physical senses. "
60 " According to the Progressives, education is to be not subject-centered, but child-centered. (“We don’t teach history, we teach Johnny.”) "