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"On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have."

"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work" "you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence and serves as a further deterrent to—to what?"

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty."

"In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D."

"Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God."

"The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way."

"You have gone almost all the way yourself. ... On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago..."

"What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or ‘adjust’ your principles. ... Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor kind of hero"