Selected quotes from The True Believer: (rec per @AbstractFairy)
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"Freedom of choice places the whole blame of failure on the shoulders of the individual. And as freedom encourages a multiplicity of attempts, it unavoidably multiplies failure and frustration." "Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is a burden"
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"It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. Had they not joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility?"
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"Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority. "
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"The frustrated, oppressed by their shortcomings, blame their failure on existing restraints. their innermost desire is for an end to the “free for all." They want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is subjected in a free society. "
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"Poverty when coupled with creativeness is usually free of frustration. Nothing so bolsters our self-confidence and reconciles us with ourselves as the continuous ability to create; to see things grow and develop under our hand, day in, day out."
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"Almost all our contemporary movements showed in their early stages a hostile attitude toward the family, and did all they could to discredit and disrupt it. They did it by undermining the authority of the parents; by facilitating divorce.."
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"Still, not one of our contemporary movements was so outspoken in its antagonism toward the family as was early Christianity" "When one of His disciples asked leave to go and bury his father, Jesus said to him: “Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead.”"
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"The Chinese sage Mo-Tzü who advocated brotherly love was rightly condemned by the Confucianists who cherished the family above all. They argued that the principle of universal love would dissolve the family and destroy society"
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"The ideal of self-advancement which the civilizing West offers to backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. Even when the Westernized native attains personal success he is not happy. He feels naked and orphaned"
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"we can never have enough of that which we really do not want, and that we run fastest and farthest when we run from ourselves"
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"The capacity to resist coercion stems partly from the individual’s identification with a group. The people who stood up best in the Nazi concentration camps were those who felt themselves members of a compact party (the Communists), of a church (priests and ministers)"
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"The individualists, whatever their nationality, caved in" "Stalin succeeded in turning proud and brave men into cringing cowards by depriving them of any possibility of identification with the party they had served all their lives and with the Russian masses."
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"In their battle orders army leaders invariably remind their soldiers that the eyes of the world are on them, that their ancestors are watching them. The great general knows how to conjure an audience out of the sands of the desert and the waves of the ocean. "
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"the present is driven back as if it were an unclean thing and lumped with the detested past." "To lose one’s life is but to lose the present; and, clearly, to lose a defiled, worthless present is not to lose much."
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"The very impracticability of many of the goals which a mass movement sets itself is part of the campaign against the present. All that is practicable, feasible and possible is part of the present. To offer something practicable would be to increase the promise of the present."
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"Those who fail in everyday affairs show a tendency to reach out for the impossible." "The successful businessman is often a failure as a communal leader because his mind is attuned to the “things that are” and his heart set on that which can be accomplished in “our time.”"
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"We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand." "The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious. The refusal to see ourselves as we are develops a distaste for facts and cold logic."
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"There is no hope for the frustrated in the actual and the possible. Salvation can come to them only from the miraculous, which seeps through a crack in the iron wall of inexorable reality. [They ask to be deceived]"
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End of conversation
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