Actions Speak Louder Than Words

“As a boy and young man, I often wished for the occasion to prove that my national enthusiasm was no mere empty whim.  Cheering sometimes seemed to me to be a kind of sinful indulgence, though I couldn’t give any justification for that feeling.

After all, who has the right to shout out a triumphant word if he hasn’t won the right to do so in a place where there is no play-acting, and where the Goddess of Destiny’s inexorable hand tests the truth and sincerity of nations and men?

Just as millions of others, I felt a proud joy in being permitted to go through this test.  I had so often sung Deutschland Über Alles, and so often roared ‘Heil’, that I now saw it as a kind of belated grace that I was allowed to appear before the Court of Eternal Justice, and to testify to the truth of those feelings.”

— from Mein Kampf (1925) by Adolf Hitler, the Dual English-German translation of Dr. Thomas Dalton, Clemens & Blair Edition, 2017, Vol. I, Chap. 5, p. 323