Leaders like Hitler: Sense gratification, that's all. (SP Lecture)
The whole history of the world, you just study, is a history of sense gratification. Just take, for example, some twenty years ago one Mr. Adolf Hitler came in the scene, and there was great upheaval as war in Europe and America. From 1933 to 1947 or something like that, the whole world was in trouble.
But he is gone, finished. And what did he do? Sense gratification, that's all. He wanted that this way government should be, according to his own sense. Another person, just like Mr. Churchill or your President Roosevelt, they said "No. The sense gratification should not be like that. The sense gratification should be like this." (laughter)
So it is the war of sense gratification, that's all. One leader is presenting a program of sense gratification, another leader is presenting another program of sense gratification, and there is clash. This is going on. This is the history of the world.
And another class, they are thinking "Oh, there are so much trouble simply for sense gratification. Let us control our senses." Brahma satyaṁ jagan mithyā, just like Māyāvādī philosophers, Śaṅkarācārya. They say this world is useless. This world is useless. Only Brahman, the Supreme Brahman, impersonal Brahman, that is truth. That is also another sense gratification. That is bigger sense gratification.
Why? These Māyāvādī philosophers, they want to merge into the existence of the Supreme One. That means by becoming Hitler, Churchill or Roosevelt, their senses were not very much satisfied. "Now," they say, "this world is false. Now let me become the Supreme." That is another sense gratification.
So this world, without Kṛṣṇa consciousness, is simply sense gratification. That's all.
Lecture, Bhagavad-gita 3.6-10, Los Angeles, December 23, 1968