Joseph Goebbels Quotes

“It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise.”

— Joseph Goebbels

“Think of the press as a great keyboard
on which the government can play.”

— Joseph Goebbels

“Man only honors what he conquers or defends.”

— Joseph Goebbels

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

— Joseph Goebbels

“THERE WILL COME A DAY WHEN ALL THE LIES WILL COLLAPSE UNDER THEIR OWN WEIGHT, AND THE TRUTH WILL TRIUMPH AGAIN”

— Joseph Goebbels

Propaganda must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets for hatred.

— Joseph Goebbels

“If you tell the same lie enough times, people will believe it; and the bigger the lie, the better.”

— Joseph Goebbels

It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.

— Joseph Goebbels

“The essence of propaganda consists in winning people over to an idea so sincerely, so vitally, that in the end they succumb to it utterly and can never escape from it.”

— Joseph Goebbels

“Whoever can conquer the street will one day conquer the state, for every form of power politics and any dictatorship-run state has its roots in the street.”

— Joseph Goebbels

“Everything is what you make of it, even yourself.”

— Joseph Goebbels

“The Jew is contrary to our being ... He desecrated our people, spit on our ideals, paralyzed the strength of the nation, made our customs rotten, and polluted the morale.”

— Joseph Goebbels

There is no need for propaganda to be rich in intellectual content.

— Joseph Goebbels

The people's community must not be a mere phrase, but a revolutionary achievement following from the radical carrying out of the basic life needs of the working class. A ruthless battle against corruption! A war against exploitation, freedom for the workers! The elimination of all economic-capitalist influences on national policy ... Maintaining a rotten economic system has nothing to do with nationalism, which is an affirmation of the Fatherland. I can love Germany and hate capitalism. Not only can I, I must.

— Joseph Goebbels

“The masses need something that will give them a thrill of horror.”

— Joseph Goebbels

We enter parliament in order to supply ourselves, in the arsenal of democracy, with its own weapons. If democracy is so stupid as to give us free tickets and salaries for this bear's work, that is its affair. We do not come as friends, nor even as neutrals. We come as enemies. As the wolf bursts into the flock, so we come.

— Joseph Goebbels

A media system wants ostensible diversity that conceals an actual uniformity

— Joseph Goebbels

“Good propaganda does not need to lie, indeed it may not lie. It has no reason to fear the truth. It is a mistake to believe that people cannot take the truth. They can. It is only a matter of presenting the truth to people in a way that they will be able to understand. A propaganda that lies proves that it has a bad cause. It cannot be successful in the long run.”

— Joseph Goebbels

“During a war, news should be given out for instruction rather than information.”

— Joseph Goebbels

“Propaganda is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. If the means achieves the end then the means is good ... the new Ministry has no other aim than to unite the nation behind the ideal of the national revolution.”

— Joseph Goebbels

“If we are attacked we can only defend ourselves with guns not with butter.”

— Joseph Goebbels

“The night is my best friend. It calms the storm in my soul and it lets the guiding stars rise.”

— Joseph Goebbels

“To attract people, to win over people to that which I have realized as being true, that is called propaganda.”

— Joseph Goebbels

“The life is worth living. It's not true, what the tired and reactionary say. We're not on this earth to suffer and die. We're here to fulfill a mission.”

— Joseph Goebbels

The war we are fighting until victory or the bitter end is in its deepest sense a war between Christ and Marx. Christ: the principle of love. Marx: the principle of hate.

— Joseph Goebbels

“Our starting point is not the individual:
We do not subscribe to the view that one should feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, or clothe the naked ... Our objectives are different: We must have a healthy people in order to prevail in the world.”

— Joseph Goebbels

“The fatherland shall one day be like this: We're not all equal, but we're all brothers.”

— Joseph Goebbels

“It takes a bomb under his arse to make Hitler see logic.”

— Joseph Goebbels

Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even imagine today?

— Joseph Goebbels

“O this world is beautiful because of you! To love somebody means that we're closer to God.”

— Joseph Goebbels

“A mother who is not everything for her children: a friend, a teacher, a confidant, a source of joy and founded pride, inducement and soothing, reconciliator, judge and forgiver, that mother obviously chose the wrong job.”

— Joseph Goebbels

“If the German people lay down their arms the whole of Eastern and Southern Europe, together with the Reich, will come under Russian occupation. Behind an iron curtain mass butcheries of people would begin.”

— Joseph Goebbels

“To be a socialist means to let the ego serve the neighbour, to sacrifice the self for the whole. In its deepest sense socialism equals service. The individual refrains and the commonwealth
demands.”

— Joseph Goebbels

“Crisis is the path to happiness. Decay and disintegration do not spell doom, but ascent and beginning. The powerful forces of a new creation operate in the hush beyond the noise of the day.”

— Joseph Goebbels

“Revolutions are spiritual acts. They appear first in people, then in politics and the economy. New people form new structures. The transformation we want is first of all spiritual; that will necessarily change the way things are.”

— Joseph Goebbels

“When I sit near the ocean in the morning and write my verses and breathe the salty wind which is coming from the water, I rejoice in God and I am blissful, as I was as a child.”

— Joseph Goebbels

“If you tell a lie, tell a big one.”

— Joseph Goebbels

“We have had much to bear already. And still more will we have to bear. Let us thank God for being young.”

— Joseph Goebbels

“I believe in God. When everything collapses, we grip the last hold, we look from the secure haven how the godless society of the old, holy Europe falls apart. May the game begin.”

— Joseph Goebbels

He who cannot hate the devil cannot love God.

— Joseph Goebbels

“Photography today is accomplishing a lofty mission in which every German should collaborate by buying a camera. The German people is ahead of every other in the technical domain and, thanks to its exceptional qualities, the small camera has conquered the whole world ... Much is at stake here from the point of view of popular consumer goods and, furthermore, photography has a particularly important political role to play. (Addressing the Berlin Photography Fair, 1933)”

— Joseph Goebbels

I'm looking for the teacher who is simple enough to be great, and great enough to be simple.

— Joseph Goebbels

I would like to be a parson on this island. Explain the Sermon on the Mount to ordinary people and let the world be the world.

— Joseph Goebbels

The night folds her trembling hands over a weary world. Out of a pale blue rises the shining moon. My thoughts are flying to the stars like lonely swans.

— Joseph Goebbels

“If Christ came back he would drive his treacherous servants out of the temple with a whip.”

— Joseph Goebbels

“Short shrift is made of the Jews in all eastern occupied areas. Tens of thousands of them are liquidated.”

— Joseph Goebbels

“Give your goods to the poor: Christ. Property is theft - as long as it's not mine: Marx .”

— Joseph Goebbels

To be modern only means to fill new forms with eternal truths.

— Joseph Goebbels

“[Hitler thought] that Mussolini was no figure of world history, like der Fuehrer or Stalin.”

— Joseph Goebbels

“It is on this beautiful day that we celebrate the Fuhrers birthday and thank him for he is the only reason why Germany is still alive today”

— Joseph Goebbels