In the war I was subject to military law, but subject to law nevertheless; now I am at the mercy of an arbitrary power.

Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all.

Always the same seesaw. The fear that my scribbling could get me put into a concentration camp. The feeling that it is my duty to write, that it is my life’s task, my calling. The feeling of vanitas vanitatum, that my scribbling is worthless. In the end I go on writing anyway, the diary, the Curriculum.

Pity is such a shabby thing. I can torment myself with wanting to feel pity, and yet I don’t succeed.

The dominant feeling is that this reign of terror can hardly last long, but that its fall will bury us.

I changed Lessing’s35 words – Anyone who does not lose his reason over certain things, has no reason – into: Anyone whose heart remains calm today, has no heart.

That is the fantastic thing about the National Socialists, that they simultaneously share in a community of ideas with Soviet Russia and with Zion.

To me the Zionists, who want to go back to the Jewish state of A.D. 70 (destruction of Jerusalem by Titus) are just as offensive as the Nazis. With their nosing after blood, their ancient "cultural roots," their partly canting, partly obtuse winding back of the world they are altogether a match for the National Socialists. That is the fantastic thing about the National Socialists, that they simultaneously share in a community of ideas with Soviet Russia and with Zion.

National Socialism adapts Fascism, Bolshevism, Americanism, works it all into Teutonic Romanticism.

Academics love the semicolon; their hankering after logic demands a division which is more emphatic than a comma, but not quite as absolute a demarcation as a full stop.