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Born of war, both Bolshevism and Fascism drew their basic education from war. They transferred to politics the lessons of the trenches: familiarity with violence, the simplicity of extreme passions, the submission of the individual to the collectivity, and finally the bitterness of futile or betrayed sacrifices.

— François Furet

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More quotes by François Furet

The bourgeoisie is a synonym for modern society. The word designates the class that gradually destroyed, by its free activity, the old aristocratic society founded on a hierarchy of birth.

The fact that Communism and Fascism assigned contradictory roles to history and reason—the emancipation of the proletariat versus the domination of the Aryan race—mattered little.

In many thundering discourses, Hitler expressed his respect, if not admiration for Stalinist Communism and its leader.

The fascist movement fed on anticommunism, the communist movement on antifascism. But both shared a hatred for the bourgeois world, which allowed them to unite.

Fascism & Communism (2004)

Nazism was a form of Bolshevism turned against its initial form.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: François Furet (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.