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Book: Ominous Parallels
Quotes of Book: Ominous Parallels

Leonard Peikoff _ Ominous Parallels
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 opposite direction, that the battle had been calculated for a diametrically opposite purpose, or that the enemy they were being pushed to destroy was: themselves.
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Leonard Peikoff _ Ominous Parallels
To liberate humanity from intelligence, Hitler counted on the doctrines of irrationalism. To rid men of conscience, he counted on the morality of altruism. To free the world of freedom, he counted on the idea of collectivism
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Leonard Peikoff _ Ominous Parallels
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 course of society, men are helpless in the face of their own motivation, laissez-faire appeals to the evil in men, but men are stuck with it."
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Leonard Peikoff _ Ominous Parallels
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.
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Leonard Peikoff _ Ominous Parallels
When the country surrendered its educational institutions-in countless forms, direct and indirect, public and private, from nursery school on up-to the legion of Progressive educators spawned by Dewey, it formally delivered its youth into the hands of the philosophy of pragmatism, to be "reconstructed" according to the pragmatist image of man.
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Leonard Peikoff _ Ominous Parallels
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 "politically childish." In fact, their "innocence" was anti-intellectuality, and their "political childishness" was {in effect} philosophical pragmatism.
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Leonard Peikoff _ Ominous Parallels
The nationalists, at heart, were socialists. The socialists, at heart, were nationalists.
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Leonard Peikoff _ Ominous Parallels
An interest," writes Kant, "is present only in a dependent will which is not of itself always in accord with reason; in the divine will we cannot conceive of an interest.
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Leonard Peikoff _ Ominous Parallels
Racial subjectivism holds that a man's inborn racial constitution determines his mental processes, his intellectual outlook, his thought patterns, his feelings, his conclusions-and that these conclusions, however well established, are valid only for members of a given race, who share the same underlying constitution.
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Leonard Peikoff _ Ominous Parallels
The best-known version of this view, the Existentialism of the fifties and sixties, held that reality is absurd and that irrational passion is the only means of knowledge.
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Leonard Peikoff _ Ominous Parallels
The fundamental goal of education, writes Dewey, "is the development of a spirit of social co-operation and community life...." The goal is to foster the child's "social capacity"-by, among other things, "saturating him with the spirit of service...."21
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Leonard Peikoff _ Ominous Parallels
Man, Aristotle held, must first grasp the appropriate facts of reality; on this basis, he can then set the goals and course of his action. Pragmatism represents a total reversal of this progression. For the pragmatist, the order is: man acts; he invents forms of thought to satisfy the needs of his action; reality adapts itself accordingly {except when, inexplicably, it resists}. First, action-second, thought-third, reality.
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