blood lust

I like this, from Hugh Trevor-Roper's classic The Last Days of Hitler, for its insight and its wit:

It was the spectacle, the imaginary contemplation of rivers of human blood that inspired him, not the thought of victory and its practical use... "If I can send the flower of the German nation into the hell of war, without the smallest pity for the spilling of precious German blood, then surely I have a right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin!" Without the smallest pity... As a logical syllogism, the proposition is perhaps defective; but as a psychological illustration it needs no improvement.