It is born in crisis, lives on crisis, and cannot survive the era of crisis. By the very law of its nature it must create for itself, if it is to con… - John T. Flynn

But alas, the most terrifying aspect of the whole fascist episode is the dark fact that most of its poisons are generated not by evil men or evil peoples, but by quite ordinary men in search of an answer to the baffling problems that beset every society. Nothing could have been further from the minds of most of them than the final brutish and obscene result. The gangster comes upon the stage only when the scene has been made ready for him by his blundering precursors.

We're going to talk about billions and we might just as well know what a billion is. To begin with, it's a lot of money… If you were to save a dollar a day every day and had been doing this every day since Adam was created in the Garden of Edin, you wouldn't have a billion dollars. In fact, to have a billion dollars you would have had to start saving 2,735,726 years before Adam was born.

Labor, of course, subjected industry to its controls through organized pressure. In Germany, as in Italy, labor and socialism were closely intertwined. And here, too, socialists were deeply implicated in the doctrines of syndicalism. The official party program did not countenance it but, just as in Italy and France, the idea of the syndicalist society as distinguished from state socialism was making headway among the rank and file of the party.