From Assorted Opinion and Maxims:

From two sides. — We are hostile to an intellectual tendency and movement if we are superior to it and disapprove of its objectives, or if its objectives are too remote and we cannot understand them, that is to say when they are superior to us. Thus a party can be opposed from two sides, from above and below; and it is no rare thing for both opponents to form an alliance grounded in their common hatred that is more repulsive than anything they join in hating.

My reading: An intellectual class can grow to loathe an outlived aristocracy so intensely that it succumbs to the temptation to court the mob. Watching a cultural elite progress from decadence to degeneration might be disgusting, but demagoguery is far worse and has fewer excuses.

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Propagandists think they can burn their enemies with their fiery rhetoric, but they forget that it is not themselves, but the fire that does the burning. If a fire gets big and hot enough it burns everything indiscriminately.

Whatever reason the fire was started, it is soon irrelevant — the fire loses its head and become nothing but burning. Whatever is flammable is liberated to burn, and to burn out of control, which is freedom. And fire is equalizing; a chair and a limb burns side by side. Things are reduced to the most primordial unit and unified: it is an inferno, singular. Fuel.

A populace on fire can’t tell the difference between an arsonist and what he burns. It’s all just an opportunity to burn and to burn. Many, many people just want to lose themselves in something greater. Fire is great. It is overwhelming, all-consuming, intoxicating and effortlessly active.

Fire is not responsible; burning is what it does.

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No human passion is responsible. Only reason is responsible. But reason is flammable.