"In wars, the goal is murder. 'The enemy's ranks thin out,' the goal is mass murder. To kill as many enemies as possible, the dangerous mass of the living must be turned into a pile of dead bodies. The winner is whoever kills more enemies. In war, we face the increasing mass of opponents. Its increase is terrifying in itself. Its threat, already included in its increase, unleashes our own aggressive mass, which pushes us into war. In conducting it, we always try to prevail, that is, to have the largest group on the spot and to exploit the enemy's weakness in every respect before his own number increases. The conduct of war is therefore in its individual parts the exact picture of what is happening as a whole: we want to be the largest mass of the living. On the enemy's side, however, we want there to be the largest pile of dead bodies. In this competition of increasing masses, there is a substantial, we could say the deepest cause of wars. One can make slaves instead of dead bodies, mainly women and children, who later serve to multiply the mass of our own race. But war is never real war unless it first seeks a pile of dead enemies."
"...The fact that wars can last so long depends on the deeper urge of the mass to maintain itself in its present state, not to dissolve, to remain a mass. This feeling is sometimes so strong that people prefer to be destroyed together rather than recognize their defeat and thus live through the dissolution of their mass.
But how is the war mass formed? What is it that suddenly forces people to risk almost everything? This process is still so enigmatic that we must approach it with some caution. It is an astonishing experiment. We decide that we are threatened with bodily annihilation and openly announce this threat to the whole world. 'I may be killed,' we declare, and within ourselves we think: 'because I want to kill this or that person.' The emphasis in reality should be on the second sentence: 'I want to kill this or that person, that's why I may be killed myself.' But for the beginning of war, for its outbreak, for the creation of the war mood among our own people, we only acknowledge the first version."