[I]t is a great mistake to suppose that the only writers who matter are those whom the educated in their saner moments can take seriously. There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures, and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. And it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history.
---Warrant for Genocide: the Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, p. 18.
[Taken from a fragment of a draft of another review:] Norman Cohn, the historian of millenarian movements, once traced the central theme of the apocalyptic battle back to the widely-distributed myth of a primordial or recurring contest between the forces of the unchanging divine order and those of chaos. The forces of order won these battles, because the old world, the world before industrialism, was ordered and unchanging: that was what made its misery bearable. We --- those of us who can read things like this, or books like Spence's --- have escaped that misery, have benefited immeasurably from the dissolution of that stability; we boast of having learned to thrive on chaos, and look on this as an era of progress. But for most of the world, most of the time, it has been an era of desparate and confused people seizing upon any idea that makes some shred of sense of a world that they do not understand, and gives them some semblance of dignity in a world that treats them abominably. They have acquired enough of our new-found powers to wreak havoc on an scale which once would have been thought truly apocalyptic, but not enough to enjoy a secure place in our world. In that gap is fitted an immense chronicle of human tragedy: chaos come again victorious.