The Origins of Totalitarianism

Expansion then was an escape not only for superfluous capital. More important, it protected its owners against the menacing prospect of remaining entirely superfluous and parasitical.

the past tradition of nationalism had become a set of illusions, a method to rally the people under a single interest.

Race was the emergency explanation of human beings whom no European or civilized man could understand and whose humanity so frightened and humiliated the immigrants that they no longer cared to belong to the same human species.

The Boers had lost both their peasant relationship to the soil and their civilized feeling for human fellowship.

As a consequence, while the race notion was somewhat modified in Asia; 'higher and lower breeds,' as the 'white man' would say when he started to shoulder his burden, still indicate a scale and the possibility of gradual development, and the idea somehow escapes the concept of two entirely different species of animal life.

The disastrous relationship between race and labor served as the foundation for the eventual segregationist policies that would dominate South African society.

The fact that this gold rush was not simply left to itself but was financed, organized, and connected with the ordinary European economy through the accumulated superfluous wealth and with the help of Jewish financiers.

Totalitarianism takes its own claim seriously, it must come to the point where it has 'to finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess,' that is, with the autonomous existence of any activity whatsoever.

Merit being 'gauged by the number of your denunciations of close comrades' makes it obvious that one must avoid all intimate contacts.

Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals.