Adolf Hitler Quotes
It is not the State that orders us; but it is we who order the State!
Hitler, Adolf. Speech at the Nuremberg Rally, 7 September 1934. Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations, 1932-1945, edited by Max Domarus, Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 1990, p. 529.
This has been one of the fundamental debates in America since its founding. Which is more important, the preservation of civil rights and personal liberty or the supremacy of the law and the stability of our institutions. In war, the tension is always existent. In law enforcement, there is also a common conflict. Prohibition, like the later War on Drugs, was not able to be enforced without the invasion of personal rights. Americans decided that Prohibition benefits were not worth it/ The debate is ongoing with respect to the War on Drugs.
It is hard for us today to understand why intelligent, thoughtful, people would seriously consider and even advocate anarchy. Yet there were many intelligent people who preached anarchy. The key to understanding this is that it is also hard for us to realize how terrible and actually dangerous was typical life under the Russian Government of the Czars. It was not only that most people were serfs--virtually slaves, but the government officials, the military and civilian both, could and did, abuse people in every way imaginable. In America today, if any of us were unfortunate to be the victim of violence, the odds are high that it would be at the hands of another citizen. In Russia (and other countries) at the time, the odds were that the perpetrator of the violence was a government official or government sanctioned person—police, military, aristocrats, civil officers. As but one example. Cossacks would frequently get drunk, pillage and rape a community and kill any who resisted—all with impunity. This quotation from Tolstoy is the classic argument of the anarchist at the time. It was impossible that the absence of government could be as bad as the government then was.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party, becoming Chancellor in 1933 and then assuming the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934. During his dictatorship from 1933 to 1945, he initiated World War II in Europe by invading Poland on 1 September 1939. He was closely involved in military operations throughout the war and was central to the perpetration of the Holocaust, the genocide of about 6 million Jews and millions of other victims.
