The group was not afraid of being radical either; they could see the good Roosevelt was doing, despite what Mother and Dad said; they were not taken … - Hannah Arendt

He was a thoroughly bad hat, then, but that was the kind, of course, that nice women broke their hearts over.

"Ah, God, it was too sad and awful, the endless hide-and-go-seek game one played with the middle class.
If one could only be sure that one did not belong to it, that one was finer, nobler, more aristocratic. The truth was, she hated it shakily from above, not solidly from below, and her proletarian sympathies constituted a sort of snub that she ad- ministered to the middle class, just as a really smart woman will outdress her friends by relentlessly underdressing them. Scratch a socialist and you find a snob. The semantic test confirmed this. In the Marxist language, your opponent was always a "parvenu," an "upstart," an "adventurer," a politician was al- ways "cheap," and an opportunist "vulgar." But the proletariat did not talk in such terms; this was the tone of the F.F.V. What the socialist movement did for a man was to allow him- self the airs of a marquis without having either his title or his sanity questioned."

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. [...] under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.