acillate and be in doubt
about the matter and will nevertheless accept as true at
least some cause or other. Consequently, even from the most
impudent lie something will always stick ...[113]

A number of other passages display Hitler's low opinion of the
intellectual capacities and critical faculties of the masses:

All propaganda has to appeal to the people and its
intellectual level has to be set in accordance with the
receptive capacities of the most-limited persons among those
to whom it intends to address itself. The larger the mass
of men to be reached, the lower its purely intellectual
level will have to be set.[114]

The receptive capacity of the great masses is very
restricted, its understanding small. On the other hand,
however, its forgetfulness is great. On account of these
facts all effective propaganda must restrict itself to very
few points and impress these by slogans, until even the last
person is able to bring to mind what is meant by such a
word.[115]

The task of propaganda is, for instance, not to evaluate
diverse rights but to emphasize exclusively the single right
of that which it is representing. It does not have to
investigate objectively the truth, so far as this is
favorable to the others, in order then to present it to the
masses in strict honesty, but rather to serve its own side
ceaselessly.[116]

If one's own propaganda even once accords just the shimmer
of right to the other side, then the basis is therewith laid
for doubt regarding one's own cause. The masses are not able
to distinguish where the error of the other side ends and
the error of one's own side begins.[117]

But all talent in presentation of propaganda will lead to no
success if a fundamental principle is not always strictly
followed. Propaganda has to restrict itself to a few matters
and to repeat these eternally. Persistence is here, as with
so many other things in the world, the first and most
important presupposition for success.[118]

In view of their slowness of mind, they [the masses] require
always, however, a certain period before they are ready even
to take cognizance of a matter, and only after a
thousandfold repetition of the most simple concept will they
finally retain it.[119]

_In all cases in which t