For someone who wanted to become a painter as a 12 year old, he could have barely become something more contrasting than what he did. But then he did paint history in his own colour. 

Following are some excerpts from Hitler's autobiography 'Mein Kampf'. They indicate that he was a thinker, much more than the politicians today are. And if he hadn't become an orphan as a teenager, and suffered the fate that he did, he would probably have become a major contributor to some field of importance to mankind.





Let's start with quotes:

"Just as a hundred fools do not make one wise man, a heroic decision is not likely to come from a hundred cowards."

"It may be that today gold has become the exclusive ruler of life, but man will some day again bow to higher gods. Many things may today owe their existence only to the longing for money and property, but among them are only few the non-existence of which would make mankind poorer."

"A man who knows a thing, who realizes a given danger, and who sees with his eyes the possibility of a remedy, has the damned duty and obligation to work, not in 'silence' but to stand up publicly against the evil and for its remedy. If he does not do so, then he is a disloyal, miserable weakling who fails either because of cowardice or because of laziness and inability."

"... in the size of the lie there is always contained a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of a people may be more corrupt in the bottom of their hearts than they will be consciously and intentionally bad, therefore with the primitive simplicity of their minds they will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one, since they themselves perhaps also lie sometimes in little things, but would certainly still be too much ashamed of too great lies. Thus such an untruth will not at all enter their heads, and therefore they will be unable to believe in the possibility of the enormous impudence of the most infamous distortion in others; indeed, they may doubt and hesitate even when being enlightened, and they accept any cause at least as nevertheless being true; therefore, just for this reason some part of the most impudent lie will remain and stick; a fact which all great lying artists and societies of this world know only too well and therefore also villainously employ."

"As regards the question of humanity, Moltke once expressed himself to the effect that in case of war humanity always resides in the brevity of the procedure, so that the sharpest kind of fight is most suitable for it."

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Hitler's views on the respective strengths of the young, and, the old:

"Here I distinguish between the wisdom of old age, which, as the result of the experiences of a long life, is of value only in the form of a greater thoroughness and carefulness as contrasted with the genius of youth whose inexhaustible fertility pours forth thoughts and ideas without being able to digest them because of their abundance. Youth furnishes the building material and the plans for the future; maturity takes and cuts the stones and constructs the building, provided the so-called wisdom of old age has not suffocated the genius of youth."


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Hitler's views on History education:

"Few teachers realize that the aim of history lessons should not consist in the memorizing and rattling forth of historical facts and data; that it does not matter whether a boy knows when this or that battle was fought, when a certain military leader was born, or when some monarch (in most cases a mediocre one) was crowned with the crown of his ancestors. Good God, these things do not matter.

 To 'learn' history means to search for and to find the forces which cause those effects which we later face as historical events."

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"Like a woman, whose psychic feeling is influenced less by abstract reasoning than by an undefinable, sentimental longing for complementary strength, who will submit to the strong man rather than dominate the weakling, thus the masses love the ruler rather than the suppliant, and inwardly they are far more satisfied by a doctrine which tolerates no rival than by the grant of liberal freedom; they often feel at a loss what to do with it, and even easily feel themselves deserted. They neither realize the impudence with which they are spiritually terrorized, nor the outrageous curtailment of their human liberties, for in no way does the delusion of this doctrine dawn on them. Thus they see only the inconsiderate force, the brutality and the aim of its manifestations to which they finally always submit."

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Hitler's views on what press(read media) does to public opinion, and the role of the state in managing press:

" What we mean by the word 'public opinion' depends only to the smallest extent on the individual's own experiences or knowledge, and largely on an image, frequently created by a penetrating and persistent sort of so-called 'enlightenment.'

 By far the greatest bulk of the political 'education,' which in this case one may rightly define with the word propaganda,' is the work of the press. It is the press above all else that carries out this 'work of enlightenment,' thus forming a sort of school for adults.

At the beginning I was astonished how short a time it took this most evil of all the great powers in the State to create a certain opinion, even if this involved complete falsification of the wishes or opinions in the minds of the public. In the course of a few days a ridiculous trifle was turned into an affair of State, whereas, at the same time, problems of vital importance were dropped into general oblivion, or rather were stolen from the minds and the memory of the masses.

So they succeeded, in the course of a few weeks, in conjuring up some names out of nothing and attaching incredible hopes to them on the part of the great public, in even giving them a popularity which the really important man may never attain during his whole lifetime. In addition, nobody had even heard of only a month before, whereas at the same time old and trustworthy representatives of public or political life, though in the bloom of health, simply died in the minds of their contemporaries, or they were showered with such wretched abuses that soon their names were in danger of becoming the symbol of villainy and rascality."

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" Just in journalistic circles one usually prefers to call the press a 'great power' of the State. As a matter of fact its importance is truly enormous. It cannot be overestimated; it is indeed actually the continuation of the education of youth in advanced age. Thereby one can divide the readers as a whole into three groups:

1. First, those who believe everything they read;
2. Secondly, those who no longer believe anything;
3. Thirdly, those who critically examine what they have read and judge accordingly.

The first group is numerically by far the greatest. It consists of the great masses of the people and therefore represents the mentally simplest part of the nation. But it cannot at all be expressed in terms of professions, but, at the utmost, in general grades of intelligence. To it belong all those to whom independent thinking is neither inborn nor instilled by education, and who, partly through inability and partly through incompetence, believe everything that is put before them printed in black on white. Also those lazybones belong to it who are well able to think for themselves, but who, out of sheer mental inertia, gratefully pick up anything that someone else has thought before, with the modest assumption that the latter will probably have exercised the right kind of effort. Now with all these people, who represent the great masses, the influence of the press will be enormous. They are not in a position, or they do not wish personally, to examine what is offered to them so that their entire attitude towards all current problems can be led back almost exclusively to the outward influence of others. This may be of advantage in case their enlightenment is carried out by a sincere and truth-loving party, but it is evil as soon as scoundrels or liars do this.

The second group is much smaller even in number. It is composed of the greater part of elements which first belonged to the first group, and who after long and bitter disappointments changed over to the contrary and believe no longer in anything at all that comes in the form of print before their eyes. They hate every newspaper; either they do not read it at all or they are annoyed at the contents without exception, since in their opinion it is composed only of lies and untruths. These people are very difficult to handle, as they will also always face the truth mistrustingly. Therefore they are lost to every positive work.

The third group finally is by far the smallest; it consists of the mentally truly fine heads whom natural gifts and education have taught to think independently, who try to form a judgment of their own about everything, and who submit most thoroughly everything they have read to an examination and further development of their own. They will not place a newspaper before their eyes without making their brains co-operate continuously, and then Mr. Author will not easily hold his own. The journalists therefore like such a reader only with reserve.

For this third group, indeed, the nonsense which a newspaper may scribble together is of little danger or importance. They have accustomed themselves anyhow in the course of their lifetime to see as a rule in every journalist a scoundrel who tells the truth only occasionally. Unfortunately, however, the importance of these excellent people lies only in their intelligence and not in their number; a misfortune in a time in which wisdom is nothing and the majority everything. Today, where the ballot of the masses decides, the decisive value lies with the most numerous group and this is the first one: the crowd of the simple ones and the credulous.

It is in the paramount interest of the State and the nation to prevent these people from falling into the hands of evil, ignorant, or even malevolent educators. The State, therefore, has the duty to supervise their education and to prevent any nuisance. Therefore, it has to watch especially the press, for its influence is by far the strongest and most penetrating on these people, as it is applied not temporarily but permanently. In the persistent and eternal repetition of this instruction lies its entire unheard-of importance. Therefore, if in any place at all, the State must not forget that just in here all means must serve an end; it must not let itself be misled by the boast of a so-called ' freedom of the press/ and must not be persuaded to fail in its duty and to put before the nation the food that it needs and that is good for it; it must assure itself with ruthless determination of this means for educating the people and to put into the service of the State and the nation."

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Hitler's views on advantages of spoken propaganda vs. written propaganda:

"A speaker is able to read from the expressions of his listeners, firstly, whether they understand what he speaks, secondly, whether they are able to follow what has been said, and thirdly, in how far he has convinced them of the correctness of what has been said. If he sees — firstly — that they do not understand him, then he will become so primitive and clear in his explanation that even the least intelligent is bound to understand him, if he feels — secondly — that they are not able to follow him, then he will build up his ideas so carefully and slowly that even the weakest among them all does not remain behind any longer, and — thirdly — as soon as he guesses that they do not seem to be convinced of the correctness of what he has said he will repeat this so often and in so many new examples, he himself will bring in their objections which he feels although they have not been uttered, and he will refute them and disperse them till finally even the last group of an opposition, merely by its attitude and its expressions, lets him recognize its capitulation in the face of his argumentation.

Here one has to deal not infrequently with overcoming prejudices of people, which are not founded in their reason, but which are most subconscious, supported only by feeling. It is a thousand times more difficult to overcome the barrier of instinctive aversion, of hatred conditioned by feeling, of prejudiced rejection than is the correction of a faulty or erroneous scientific opinion. Wrong conceptions and inferior knowledge can be abolished by instruction, but never obstacles of sentiment. Here solely an appeal to these mysterious forces themselves can be effective; and this the writer can hardly ever do, but almost exclusively only the speaker."

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Hitler's views on key to successful propoganda:

"Influence on the great masses, concentration on few points, continuous repetition of the latter, self-assured and confident wording of the texts in the form of apodictic assertion, greatest persistency in spreading, and patience in awaiting the effect."

"The great masses' receptive ability is only very limited, their understanding is small, but their forgetfulness is great. As a consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda has to limit itself only to a very few points and to use them like slogans until even the very last man is able to imagine what is intended by such a word. As soon as one sacrifices this basic principle and tries to become versatile, the effect will fritter away, as the masses are neither able to digest the material offered nor to retain it."

"All propaganda has to be popular and has to adapt its spiritual level to the perception of the least intelligent of those towards whom it intends to direct itself. Therefore its spiritual level has to be screwed the lower, the greater the mass of people which one wants to attract."

" As a whole, and at all times, the efficiency of the truly national leader consists primarily in preventing the division of the attention of a people, and always in concentrating it on a single enemy. The more uniformly the fighting will of a people is put into action, the greater will be the magnetic force of the movement and the more powerful the impetus of the blow. It is part of the genius of a great leader to make adversaries of different fields appear as always belonging to one category only, because to weak and unstable characters the knowledge that there are various enemies will lead only too easily to incipient doubts as to their own cause. As soon as the wavering masses find themselves confronting too many enemies, objectivity at once steps in, and the question is raised whether actually all the others are wrong and their own nation or their own movement alone is right. Also with this comes the first paralysis of their own strength. Therefore, a number of essentially different internal enemies must always be regarded as one in such a way that in the opinion of the mass of one's own adherents the war is being waged against one enemy alone. This strengthens the belief in one's own cause and increases one's bitterness against the attacker."

"The Pan-German movement would probably never have made this mistake if it had not possessed too little understanding for the psyche of the great masses. If its leaders had known that, in order to achieve any success, one must not present, for purely psychological reasons, two enemies to the masses, because this would lead to a complete split-up of the fighting strength, then for this reason alone the direction of the blows of the Pan-German movement would have been aimed against one adversary alone. Nothing is more dangerous for a political party than to be led by those jacks-of-all-trades who want to do everything without ever attaining the least thing."

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Hitler's views on the measure of success for a state:

"The quality of a State cannot be evaluated according to the cultural height or the significance of power of this State in the frame of the rest of the world, but exclusively according to the degree of the quality of this institution with regard to the nationality involved in that particular case."

It doesn't matter if the state is a military or economic superpower, if the people of the country are not living a good life. Particularly true for developing countries like India where the government aspires to become a 'superpower' while millions lack basic necessities. Makes sense?

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Hitler's views on colonialism:

"Only when the boundaries of the Reich include even the last German, only when it is no longer possible to assure him of daily bread inside them, does there arise, out of the distress of the nation, the moral right to acquire foreign soil and territory. The sword is then the plow, and from the tears of war there grows the daily bread for generations to come."

Pragmatic, without being preachy. Isn't it?

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Hitler's views on labor relations:

"Exactly as a worker sins against the spirit of a genuine people's community if, based on his power, he makes extortionate demands without consideration for the common welfare and the existence of a national economy, an employer breaks this community just as much if he abuses the national working strength by exploitation and an inhuman business management, and makes millions out of its sweat. Then he has no right to call himself national, he has no right to moan about a people's community, but he is an egotistical rascal, who, by introducing social discontent, provokes future fights which are bound to injure the nation in one way or another."

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We are not fans of Adolf Hitler, but do sympathize with the child who faced the adverse conditions that he did. Only if the child had a healthier childhood, one of the biggest villains of modern history would've never been born. His autobiography is probably the biggest indicator of the fact that he was just a normal kid - impressionable and vulnerable, while at the same time very hard working and with a keen desire to learn.