Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

the more significant if the end is conceived in the right way and the fight carried through
with unswerving persistence.
Many of the officials who direct the affairs of State nowadays may find it easier to work for
the maintenance of the present order than to fight for a new one. They will find it more
comfortable to look upon the State as a mechanism, whose purpose is its own preservation,
and to say that their lives 'belong to the State' -- as if anything that grew from the inner life of
the nation can logically serve anything but the national being, and as if man could be made
for anything else than for his fellow beings. Naturally, it is easier, as I have said, to consider
the authority of the State as nothing but the formal mechanism of an organization, rather
than as the sovereign incarnation of a people's instinct for self-preservation on this earth. For
these weak minds the State and the authority of the State is nothing but an aim in itself,
while for us it is an effective weapon in the service of the great and eternal struggle for
existence, a weapon which everyone must adopt, not because it is a mere formal mechanism,
but because it is the main expression of our common will to exist.
Therefore, in the fight for our new idea, which conforms completely to the primal meaning of
life, we shall find only a small number of comrades in a social order which has become
decrepit not only physically but mentally also. From these strata of our population only a few
exceptional people will join our ranks, only those few old people whose hearts have remained
young and whose courage is still vigorous, but not those who consider it their duty to
maintain the state of affairs that exists.
Against us we have the innumerable army of all those who are lazy-minded and indifferent
rather than evil, and those whose self-interest leads them to uphold the present state of
affairs. On the apparent hopelessness of our great struggle is based the magnitude of our
task and the possibilities of success. A battle-cry which from the very start will scare off all
the petty spirits, or at least discourage them, will become the signal for a rally of all those
temperaments that are of the real fighting metal. And it must be clearly recognized that if a
highly energetic and active body of men emerge from a nation and unite in the fight for one
goal, thereby ultimately rising above the inert masses of the people, this small percentage will
become masters of the whole. World history is made by minorities if these numerical
minorities represent in themselves the will and energy and initiative of the people as a whole.
What seems an obstacle to many persons is really a preliminary condition of our victory. Just
because our task is so great and because so many difficulties have to be overcome, the
highest probability is that only the best kind of protagonists will join our ranks. This
selection is the guarantee of our success.
Nature generally takes certain measures to correct the effect which racial mixture produces
in life. She is not much in favour of the mongrel. The later products of cross-breeding have to
suffer bitterly, especially the third, fourth and fifth generations. Not only are they deprived of
the higher qualities that belonged to the parents who participated in the first mixture, but
they also lack definite will-power and vigorous vital energies owing to the lack of harmony in
the quality of their blood. At all critical moments in which a person of pure racial blood
makes correct decisions, that is to say, decisions that are coherent and uniform, the person
of mixed blood will become confused and take measures that are incoherent. Hence we see
that a person of mixed blood is not only relatively inferior to a person of pure blood, but is
also doomed to become extinct more rapidly. In innumerable cases wherein the pure race
holds its ground the mongrel breaks down. Therein we witness the corrective provision which
Nature adopts. She restricts the possibilities of procreation, thus impeding the fertility of
cross-breeds and bringing them to extinction.