"I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few"
About this Quote
A chilling bit of political craft, delivered with the cold self-awareness of a propagandist who knows exactly what he is doing: split the public into a manipulable mass and a trusted inner circle. The line isn’t merely contemptuous; it’s operational. “Emotion” becomes a tool for mobilizing crowds without inviting scrutiny, while “reason” is framed as a private currency exchanged only among elites who understand the machinery behind the spectacle.
The subtext is a blueprint for asymmetry. If the many are to be moved by feeling, they’re also to be denied the status of rational agents. That denial does two things at once: it licenses deceit (“they can’t handle the truth”) and it flatters the few (“you’re in on the real story”). Authoritarian movements thrive on this double-bind, selling belonging to followers while quietly insisting those followers are unfit to govern themselves.
Context matters because Nazi politics was not an accidental frenzy; it was an engineered emotional economy. Hitler’s public performances - mass rallies, mythic language, scapegoating, promises of restored greatness - were designed to bypass deliberation and convert anxiety into loyalty and violence. “Reason,” when it appeared, lived behind closed doors in strategy sessions about power, coercion, and administrative control.
The sentence also smuggles in a perverse definition of intelligence: rationality is not for understanding reality, but for managing perception. That inversion is the tell. It’s not a leader confessing a weakness; it’s a criminal describing method, the logic of a regime that treated human beings as material to be shaped rather than citizens to be persuaded.
The subtext is a blueprint for asymmetry. If the many are to be moved by feeling, they’re also to be denied the status of rational agents. That denial does two things at once: it licenses deceit (“they can’t handle the truth”) and it flatters the few (“you’re in on the real story”). Authoritarian movements thrive on this double-bind, selling belonging to followers while quietly insisting those followers are unfit to govern themselves.
Context matters because Nazi politics was not an accidental frenzy; it was an engineered emotional economy. Hitler’s public performances - mass rallies, mythic language, scapegoating, promises of restored greatness - were designed to bypass deliberation and convert anxiety into loyalty and violence. “Reason,” when it appeared, lived behind closed doors in strategy sessions about power, coercion, and administrative control.
The sentence also smuggles in a perverse definition of intelligence: rationality is not for understanding reality, but for managing perception. That inversion is the tell. It’s not a leader confessing a weakness; it’s a criminal describing method, the logic of a regime that treated human beings as material to be shaped rather than citizens to be persuaded.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
|---|---|
| Source | Later attribution: Conversations with Hitler or – Quid Est Veritas? (Mary Bell, 2018) modern compilationISBN: 9781546294856 · ID: 9rdqDwAAQBAJ
Evidence: ... I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few.” — Adolf Hitler RM: Because the Fuehrer's authority, his credibility began cracking. Certainly, after the Normandy invasion succeeded, most Gau leaders solely fought against ... Other candidates (1) Adolf Hitler (Adolf Hitler) compilation43.8% e more become the symbol of the german worker and the sickle the sign of the ger |
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