A philosophy of education, in short, is essential to being a proper parent; otherwise, you are merely turning your child over to blind chance.
Has been said that Nazism is not a philosophy but a passion for destruction. Destruction, however, cannot be achieved with the Nazi consistency or on the Nazi scale, except by means of a certain philo...
The principles of morality are a product not of feeling, but of cognition.
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 polit...
Hegel would not have been possible but for Kant, who would not have been possible but for Plato. These three, more than any others, are the intellectual builders of Auschwitz.
When the leading voices of the emotionalist Republic championed feeling, it was not as a source of knowledge or of human happiness, but of freedom: the freedom from objectivity, method, logic, fact. I...
The nationalists, at heart, were socialists. The socialists, at heart, were nationalists.
The final product of the camps, one which the Nazis carefully shaped, was death. What the SS shaped was mass death without a murmur of protest; death accepted placidly by victims and killers alike; de...
The dominant, mystical ideas of such cultures represent a nonrational approach to the world, not an antirational approach. In essence, the spokesmen of these earlier times did not know what reason is,...
The defenders of capitalism spent their time broadcasting the vibrations of guilt and futility. Implicitly or explicitly, they were telling the country: human intelligence is impotent to control the c...
The Nazi] death camps, notes a writer in The New York Times, were conceived, built and often administered by Ph.D.’s.10 What had those Ph.D.’s been taught to think in their schools and universities—an...
Nihilism in this context means hatred, the hatred of values and of their root, reason. Hatred is not the same as disapproval, contempt, or anger. Hatred is loathing combined with fear, and with the de...
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 op...
Vice, in the Objectivist view, is not a rewarding policy; it is unconsciousness-willful, self-induced unconsciousness, while one continues to move around and function. To a conscious organism no cours...
The worker, said August Bebel (a revered prewar party leader), has little interest in a state in which political liberty is merely the goal. . . . What good is mere political liberty to him if he is h...
The voters were aware of the Nazi ideology. Nazi literature, including statements of the Nazi plans for the future, papered the country during the last years of the Weimar Republic. Mein Kampf alone s...
The victim’s submission to utter senselessness becomes the defeat of sense. His obeisance to absurdity becomes the refutation of logic.
The system which Hitler established—the social reality which so many Germans were so eager to embrace or so willing to endure—the politics which began in a theory and ended in Auschwitz—was: the total...
The sneer is expressed by philosophic movements which boastfully offer no message, by educators who deliberately teach no subject matter, by artists whose work eliminates recognizable content, by psyc...
The Social Democrats continued all the longtime traditions of their party and sought support in essence from only one segment of the electorate: the proletariat, i.e., the urban workers. The party’s g...