Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

Particularly the broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech. And
all great movements are popular movements, volcanic eruptions of human passions and
emotional sentiments, stirred either by the cruel Goddess of Distress or by the firebrand of
the word hurled among the masses; they are not the lemonade-like outpourings of literary
aesthetes and drawingroom heroes.
Only a storm of hot passion can turn the destinies of peoples, and he alone can arouse
passion who bears it within himself.
It alone gives its chosen one the words which like hammer blows can open the gates to the
heart of a people.
But the man whom passion fails and whose lips are sealed- he has not been chosen by
Heaven to proclaim its will.
Therefore, let the writer remain by his ink-well, engaging in 'theoretical' activity, if his
intelligence and ability are equal to it; for leadership he is neither born nor chosen.
A movement with great aims must therefore be anxiously on its guard not to lose contact
with the broad masses.
It must examine every question primarily from this standpoint and make its decisions
accordingly.
It must, furthermore, avoid everything which might diminish or even weaken its ability to
move the masses, not for 'demagogic' reasons, but in the simple knowledge that without the
mighty force of the mass of a people, no great idea, however lofty and noble it may seem, can
be realized.
Hard reality alone must determine the road to the goal; unwillingness to travel unpleasant
roads only too often in this world means to renounce the goal; which may or may not be what
you want.
As soon as the Pan-German movement by its parliamentary attitude had shifted the weight of
its activity to parliament instead of the people, it lost the future and instead won cheap
successes of the moment.
It chose the easier struggle and thereby became unworthy of ultimate victory.
Even in Vienna I pondered this very question with the greatest care, and in the failure to
recognize it saw one of the main causes of the collapse of the movement which in those days,
in my opinion, was predestined to undertake the leadership of the German element.
The first two mistakes which caused the Pan-German movement to founder were related to
each other. Insufficient knowledge of the inner driving forces of great revolutions led to an
insufficient estimation of the importance of the broad masses of the people; from this
resulted its insufficient interest in the social question, its deficient and inadequate efforts to
win the soul of the lower classes of the nation, as well as its over-favorable attitude toward
parliament.
If they had recognized the tremendous power which at all times must be attributed to the
masses as the repository of revolutionary resistance, they would have worked differently in
social and propagandist matters. Then the movement's center of gravity would not have been
shifted to parliament, but to the workshop and the street.
Likewise the third error finds its ultimate germ in failure to recognize the value of the
masses, which, it is true, need superior minds to set them in motion in a given direction, but
which then, like a flywheel, lend the force of the attack momentum and uniform persistence.
The hard struggle which the Pan-germans fought with the Catholic Church can be accounted
for only by their insufficient understanding of the spiritual nature of the people.
The causes for the new party's violent attack on Rome were as follows:
As soon as the House of Habsburg had definitely made up its mind to reshape Austria into a
Slavic state, it seized upon every means which seemed in any way suited to this tendency.
Even religious institutions were, without the
slightest qualms, harnessed to the service of the new ' state idea ' by
this unscrupulous ruling house.