In posting a quote, rarely (if ever) does a blogger wish to endorse all that the quoted author has said. This is particularly the case here. I have been reading two books today: Jim Gordon’s brilliant biography on James Denney, and Hitler’s Mein Kamp. The two books, unsurpringly, have little in common. I hope to post on Jim’s book sometime soon. However, for now, I found this passage in Mein Kamp so revealing that it deserved posting:

Generally speaking, every action carried out on the grand style in this world is the expression of a desire that has already existed for a long time in millions of human hearts, a longing which may have been nourished in silence. Yes, it may happen that throughout centuries men may have been yearning for the solution of a definite problem, because they have been suffering under an unendurable order of affairs, without seeing on the far horizon the coming fulfilment of the universal longing. Nations which are no longer capable of finding an heroic deliverance from such a sorrowful fate may be looked upon as effete. But, on the other hand, nothing gives better proof of the vital forces of a people and the consequent guarantee of its right to exist than that one day, through a happy decree of Destiny, a man arises who is capable of liberating his people from some great oppression, or of wiping out some bitter distress, or of calming the national soul which had been tormented through its sense of insecurity, and thus fulfilling what had long been the universal yearning of the people’. – Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1939), 392.

It all sounds scaringly familiar, doesn’t it?