Friday, February 17, 2012

...and when it's all over, the mass madness, the delight in roaring crowds, the flag waving; when this illness of our age, pretending that base instincts are good and battles for radical conservatism necessary, is gone, then one day someone will make an earth shaking discovery. They will discover the individual human being. They will say: Everything depends on individuals. The question will be: are they happy, and the goal: are they free. Groups will be secondary. The State will be secondary. Important will be not that the State lives, but that the human being lives...People will cheer and say: 'how novel! What courage! We never heard that before! Books will be written, not by that first person but by his successors because the first is always stupid. And the result will be that thousands of banners and brown, red, and blue shirts will be thrown in the trash and people will start to have courage and believe in themselves without fear of the State, before which they previously grovelled like beaten dogs...
--written by the German author Kurt Tucholsky in 1931

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