Quotes from Leonard Peikoff

In many respects, the West has not recovered from the Middle Ages.

The Nazis preached a certain philosophy—and they carried it out in action. They preached authority above rights, the group above the individual, sacrifice above happiness, nihilism above morality, feelings above facts, pliability above absolutes, obedience above logic, the Führer above the self—and they applied it.

Although rarely given a clear definition, "extremism," in essence, is a term used to condemn those who hold unpopular values intransigently and in action refuse to compromise them; the nature of such action is not delimited by the concept.

Christianity prepared the ground. It paved the way for modern totalitarianism by entrenching three fundamentals in the Western mind: in metaphysics, the worship of the supernatural; in epistemology, the reliance on faith; as a consequence, in ethics, the reverence for self-sacrifice.

For those new to philosophy, its two fundamental branches are metaphysics, which studies the nature of existence, and epistemology, which studies man's means of knowledge.

The alleged political equality of men under such a government, declared Rosa Luxemburg, the top Spartacist theoretician, "is nothing but lies and falsehoods so long as the economic power of capital still exists.

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.

During the war, a faction of young Marxists had broken away from the Social Democrats, denouncing the party's pro-war policy as a betrayal of the class struggle. These youths soon formed themselves into the Spartacus League (named after the rebellious Roman slave), then, after the war, reorganized the group as the Communist party of Germany

Socialism," said Rosa Luxemburg, "does not mean getting together in a parliament and deciding on laws. For us socialism means the smashing of the ruling classes with all the brutality that the proletariat is able to develop in its struggle.

In an advanced, civilized country, a handful of men were able to gain for their criminal schemes the enthusiastic backing of millions of decent, educated, law-abiding citizens. What is the factor that made this possible?

The German university students were among the earliest groups to back Hitler. The intellectuals were among his regime's most ardent supporters. Professors with distinguished academic credentials, eager to pronounce their benediction on the Führer's cause, put their scholarship to work full time; they turned out a library of admiring volumes, adorned with obscure allusions and learned references.

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.

the "total state." The term, from which the adjective "totalitarian" derives, was coined by Hitler's mentor, Mussolini.

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

A country with a philosophic base, freed of fundamental uncertainty and guilt, would not tolerate leaders who evade every choice, crawl down the middle of every road, and wait for the deluge. It would not tolerate any deluge by the waves of self-righteous, man-hating evil, foreign or domestic. It would not apologize for its greatness to the worshipers of weakness. It would not watch in despair while its youth turned in despair to cults, communes, and cocaine.

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

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.

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.

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.

Philosophy is the study of the nature of existence, of knowledge, and of values.

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.

Germany has been called "the land of poets and philosophers." But its education offered the country no protection against the Sergeant Molls in its ranks.

The branch of philosophy that studies existence is metaphysics.

The essentialized approach is the opposite of that practiced by today's academic establishment, who reject system-building—that is, broad integration—in favor of the analysis of minutiae. I am as far from today's philosophy departments as an atheist is from the pope or, in more positive terms, as a man who wants to live is from an ascetic writhing in the desert. My explanation of today's philosophers is offered below, in my discussion of the D2 mentality.