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It was in Nazi Germany that Bolshevism was perfected; there, political power truly absorbed all spheres of existence, from the economy to religion, from technology to the soul. The irony, the tragedy, of history was that both totalitarian regimes, identical in their aim for absolute power over dehumanized beings, presented themselves as protection from the danger presented by the other.

— 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.