Mark Lilla:

“In 1930, after the National Socialists won a disturbingly large number of seats in parliament—a storm warning, [Thomas Mann] called it — he delivered an address titled ‘An Appeal to Reason’ that exposed the fanatical reactionary state of mind behind Nazism: ‘Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstasy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face.'”

— “The Writer Apart,” NY Review of Books, May 13, 2021, p. 18