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Sections (Content) :
• 1
Nothing is more dangerous for man's private morality than the habit of command. The best man, the most intelligent, disinterested, generous, pure, will infallibly and always be spoiled at this trade. Two sentiments inherent in power never fail to produce this demoralization; they are: contempt for the masses and the overestimation of one's own merits.
• 2
...as governments in turn are the negations of individuals or of the people, it is reasonable that the latter, waking up to essential truths, should gradually come to feel a greater horror at its own annihilation than that of its masters.
• 3
...misfortune to them if they believe themselves already ... strong enough to crush the people, their sovereign master.
• 4
The mere "aggressiveness" of a Napoleon or a Hitler could not cause a war. One can find their like at any street corner. What causes war is the meekness of the many. Obedience enables leaders to pursue an aggressive course.
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He who is not in any particular office, has nothing to do with plans for the administration of its duties.
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Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead them out of bondage. He has not come; he never will come. I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out, you could be led back again.... I would have you make up your minds that there is nothing that you cannot do for yourselves.
• 7
You have depended too much on that leader and not enough on yourself. I don't want you to follow me. I want you to cultivate self-reliance.
If I have the slightest capacity for leadership I can only give evidence of it by leading you to rely upon yourselves.
• 8
When interest prevails in every breast, the sovereign and his party cannot escape the infection: he employs the force with which he is entrusted, to turn his people into a property, and to command their possessions for his profit or his pleasure.
• 9
...it were vain to flatter the monarch or his people. The first cannot bestow liberty, without raising a spirit, which may, on occasion, stand in opposition to his own designs; nor the latter receive this blessing, while they own that it is in the right of a master to give or to withhold it.
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...the master himself is probably the rudest and least cultivated animal of the herd; he is inferior to the slave whom he raises from a servile office to the first places of trust or of dignity in his court.
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The oft repeated slogan of our time is, among all politicians, the Socialists included, that ours is an era of individualism, of the minority. Only those who do not probe beneath the surface might be led to entertain this view. Have not the few accumulated the wealth of the world? Are they not the masters, the absolute kings of the situation? Their success, however, is due not to individualism, but to the inertia, the cravenness, the utter submission of the mass. The latter wants but to be dominated, to be led, to be coerced. As to individualism, at no time in human history did it have less chance of expression, less opportunity to assert itself in a normal, healthy manner.
• 12
...nature cannot entitle me, give me capacity or might, to that to which only my act entitles me. That the king's child sets himself above other children, even this is his act, which secures to him the precedence; and that the other children approve and recognize this act is their act, which makes them worthy to be -- subjects.
• 13
So it is not the Alexanders and Humberts, nor the Wilhelms, Nicholases, and Chamberlains -- though they decree these oppressions of the nations and these wars -- who are really the most guilty of these sins, but it is rather those who place and support them in the position of arbiters over the lives of their fellow-men. And, therefore, the thing to do is not to kill Alexanders, Nicholases, Wilhelms, and Humberts, but to cease to support the arrangement of society of which they are a result. And what supports the present order of society is the selfishness and stupefaction of the people, who sell their freedom and honor for insignificant material advantages.
• 14
...there are millions of people upon earth who have a hundred times more to complain of than King Charles Edward, the Emperor Ivan, or the Sultan Achmet.
Chronology :
March 12, 2020 : The Masses -- Added.
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