If We Don't Know Our Own History,

Entirely New Concepts Are Very Rare In Politics.

Violence Can Always Destroy Power; Out Of The Barrel Of A Gun Grows The Most Effective Command, Resulting In The Most Instant And Perfect Obedience. What Never Can Grow Out Of It Is Power.

The Essence Of Totalitarian Government, And Perhaps The Nature Of Every Bureaucracy, Is To Make Functionaries And Mere Cogs In The Administrative Machinery Out Of Men, And Thus To Dehumanize Them. And One Can Debate Long And Profitably On The Rule Of Nobody, Which Is What The Political Form Known As Bureau-cracy Truly Is….we Have Become Very Much Accustomed By Modern Psychology And Sociology, Not To Speak Of Modern Bureaucracy, To Explaining Away The Responsibility Of The Doer For His Deed In Terms Of This Or That Kind Of Determinism.

Caution In Handling Generally Accepted Opinions That Claim To Explain Whole Trends Of History Is Especially Important For The Historian Of Modern Times, Because The Last Century Has Produced An Abundance Of Ideologies That Pretend To Be Keys To History But Are Actually Nothing But Desperate Efforts To Escape Responsibility.

The Will To Power, As The Modern Age From Hobbes To Nietzsche Understood It, Far From Being A Characteristic Of The Strong, Is, Like Envy And Greed, Among The Vices Of The Weak, And Possibly Even Their Most Dangerous One. Power Corrupts Indeed When The Weak Band Together In Order To Ruin The Strong, But Not Before.