Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

organization with its few members seemed to me to possess the one advantage that it had not
frozen into an 'organization,' but left the individual an opportunity for real personal activity.
Here it was still possible to work, and the smaller the movement, the more readily it could be
put into the proper form. Here the content, the goal, and the road could still be determined,
which in the existing great parties was impossible from the outset.
The longer I tried to think it over, the more the conviction grew in me that through just such
a little movement the rise of the nation could some day be organized, but never through the
political parliamentary parties which clung far too greatly to the old conceptions or even
shared in the profits of the new regime. For it was a new philosophy and not a new election
slogan that had to be proclaimed.
Truly a very grave decision-to begin transforming this intention into reality!
What prerequisites did I myself bring to this task?
That I was poor and without means seemed to me the most bearable part of it, but it was
harder that I was numbered among the nameless, that I was one of the millions whom
chance permits to live or summons out of existence without even their closest neighbors
condescending to take any notice of it. In addition, there was the difficulty which inevitably
arose from my lack of schooling.
The so called 'intelligentsia' always looks down with a really limitless condescension on
anyone who has not been dragged through the obligatory schools and had the necessary
knowledge pumped into him. The question has never been: What are the man's abilities? but:
What has he learned? To these 'educated' people the biggest empty-head, if he is wrapped in
enough diplomas, is worth more than the brightest boy who happens to lack these costly
envelopes. And so it was easy for me to imagine how this ' educated ' world would confront
me, and in this I erred only in so far as even then I still regarded people as better than in cold
reality they for the most part unfortunately are. As they are, to be sure, the exceptions, as
everywhere else, shine all the more brightly. Thereby, however, I learned always to
distinguish between the eternal students and the men of real ability.
After two days of agonized pondering and reflection, I finally came to the conviction that I had
to take this step.
It was the most decisive resolve of my life. From here there was and could be no turning
back.
And so I registered as a member of the German Workers' Party and received a provisional
membership card with the number 7.