Laudator Temporis Acti

Tacitus, Germania 4 (tr. M. Hutton, rev. E.H. Warmington):

Personally I associate myself with the opinions of those who hold that in the peoples of Germany there has been given to the world a race unmixed by intermarriage with other races, a peculiar people and pure, like no one but themselves, whence it comes that their physique, so far as can be said with their vast numbers, is identical: fierce blue eyes, red hair, tall frames, powerful only spasmodically, not correspondingly tolerant of labour and hard work, and by no means habituated to bearing thirst and heat; to cold and hunger, thanks to the climate and the soil, they are accustomed.

ipse eorum opinionibus accedo, qui Germaniae populos nullis aliis aliarum nationum conubiis infectos propriam et sinceram et tantum sui similem gentem exstitisse arbitrantur. unde habitus quoque corporum, tamquam in tanto hominum numero, idem omnibus: truces et caerulei oculi, rutilae comae, magna corpora et tantum ad impetum valida: laboris atque operum non eadem patientia, minimeque sitim aestumque tolerare, frigora atque inediam caelo solove adsueverunt.

Christopher B. Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011), p. 96, calls this the "most dangerous paragraph" of Tacitus' most dangerous book. Elsewhere (p. 57) Krebs quotes Rudolf of Fulda's paraphrase (Translatio S. Alexandri, chapter 1, p. 423 Krutsch):

The Saxons most carefully guarded their race and nobility and did not taint themselves casually by intermarriage with any other tribes, let alone inferior ones; they tried to generate a distinct, unadulterated people that resembles only itself.

generis quoque ac nobilitatis suae providissimam curam habentes, nec facile ullis aliarum gentium vel sibi inferiorum conubiis infecti, propriam et sinceram et tantum sui simile gentem facere conati sunt.

Related post: Pure Blood.