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Joseph Goebbels

187 quotes

“If Germany stays united and marches to the rhythm of its revolutionary socialist outlook, it will be unbeatable. Our indestructible will to life, and the driving force of the Führer’s personality guarantee this.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1943 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Winter Crisis is Over” speech on June 4, 1943 at the Berlin Sport Palace, “Überwundene Winterkrise, Rede im Berliner Sportpalast,” Der steile Aufstieg (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP., 1944), pp. 287-306.
“We and we alone [the Nazis] have the best social welfare measures. Everything is done for the nation. . . .The Jews are the incarnation of capitalism.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1942 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942-1945, Victor Klemperer, Vol. 2 , Random House, Inc. (2001) p. 317. Goebbels’ “Our Socialism” editorial was written on April 30, 1944.
“If the German people lay down their weapons, the Soviets, according to the agreement between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, would occupy all of East and Southeast Europe along with the greater part of the Reich. An iron curtain would fall over this enormous territory controlled by the Soviet Union, behind which nations would be slaughtered.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Article titled 'Das Jahr 2000' printed in the newspaper Das Reich, February 25, 1945, pp. 1-2
“Germany in any case has no intention of bowing to this threat, but means to counter it in time and if necessary with the most complete and radical extermi—[correcting himself]—elimination [Ausrott — Ausschaltung]. [Applause. Shouts of "Out with the Jews." Laughter].”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Joseph Goebbels (“slip of the tongue”/faux pas — he almost said “extermination“), Sportsplast speech (18 February 1943), quoted by Saul Friedländer in, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (2…
“This thorough evaluation of the Speech, by a German historian, doesn’t mention the faux pas.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) said by 1945 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No contemporaneous newspapers (German, Allied, neutral, or otherwise) reported on Goebbels’ “Ausrott…-schaltung” slip of the tongue in his 18 February 1943 Sportpalast speech.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) said by 1945 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Grok, AI, retrieved 2026-04-14
“She has confessed her parentage to me. Since then, the first enchantment ruined.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1924 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Goebbels diary entry in 1924 after finding out his girlfriend Else Janke had a Jewish mother.
“We will turn National Socialism into a party of class struggle,…”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1925 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: May 1925 as quoted in Hitler: Only the World was Enough, Brendan Simms, Penguin Books (2020), p. 105
“Düsseldorf; big red posters up. Lenin or Hitler! Thundering attendance. All of them communists. They want to state a disturbance. I grip them in no time and do not let go for two hours. We are making progress.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1925 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 9 October 1925, The Early Goebbels Diaries 1925-1926, Helmut Heiber, edit. Oliver Watson, trans. Frederick A. Praeger, New York, (1963)
“Germany gives in and sells out to the capitalist West. A horrible prospect: Germany’s sons will bleed to death on the battlefield of Europe as the mercenaries of capitalism. Perhaps, probably in a ‘holy war against Moscow!’ Can there be anything political more infamous. Are our rulers blockheads or rogues!”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1925 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 16 October 1925, The Early Goebbels Diaries 1925-1926, Helmut Heiber, edit. Oliver Watson, trans. Frederick A. Praeger, New York, (1963)
“And in the last analysis better to go down with Bolshevism than live in eternal capitalist servitude.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1925 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 23 October 1925, The Early Goebbels Diaries 1925-1926, Helmut Heiber, edit. Oliver Watson, trans. Frederick A. Praeger, New York, (1963)
“National and socialist! What comes first and what second? For us in the West there can be no doubt. First the socialist redemption, then, like a hurricane, national liberation.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1925 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 11 September 1925, The Early Goebbels Diaries 1925-1926, Helmut Heiber, edit. Oliver Watson, trans. Frederick A. Praeger, New York, (1963)
“Speech in the evening. Almost exclusively port workers. One proper communist. I am almost at one with him.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1925 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 14 November 1925, The Early Goebbels Diaries 1925-1926, Helmut Heiber, edit. Oliver Watson, trans. Frederick A. Praeger, New York, (1963)
“On to Chemnitz. Speech to two thousand communists. Meeting quiet and factual. At the end devastating free-for-all fight. A thousand beer glasses smashed. Hundred and fifty wounded, thirty seriously, two dead.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1925 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 23 November 1925, The Early Goebbels Diaries 1925-1926, Helmut Heiber, edit. Oliver Watson, trans. Frederick A. Praeger, New York, (1963)
“[Hitler] has thought it all out. His ideal: Blend of collectivism and individualism. The land: all that is on it and below it for the people. Production, individualistic for those who create. Combines, trusts, production of finished articles, transport, etc. to be socialized.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1925 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 13 April 1926, The Early Goebbels Diaries 1925-1926, Helmut Heiber, edit. Oliver Watson, trans. Frederick A. Praeger, New York, (1963)
“Say what you will: politics spoils a man’s character. Or rather: politics show how basically rotten man’s character is.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1925 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 7 June 1926, The Early Goebbels Diaries 1925-1926, Helmut Heiber, edit. Oliver Watson, trans. Frederick A. Praeger, New York, (1963)
“What does Christianity mean today? National Socialism is a religion. All we lack is a religious genius capable of uprooting outmoded religious practices and putting new ones in their place. We lack traditions and ritual. One day soon National Socialism will be the religion of all Germans. My Party is my church, and I believe I serve the Lord best if I do his will, and liberate my oppressed people from the fetters of slavery. That is my gospel.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1928 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 16 October 1928
“The Führer's verdict on the Poles is damning. More like animals than human beings, completely primitive, stupid, and amorphous. And a ruling class that is an unsatisfactory result of a mingling between the lower orders and an Aryan master race. The Poles' dirtiness is unimaginable. Their capacity for intelligent judgment is absolutely nil.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: , (entry: 10 October 1939)
“The Führer is deeply religious, though completely anti-Christian. He views Christianity as a symptom of decay. Rightly so. It is a branch of the Jewish race.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Goebbels Diaries 1939-1941, trans. & edit. Fred Tayor, New York, NY, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1983, (entry: December 29, 1939), p. 77
“The Führer once again expressed his determination to clean up the Jews in Europe pitilessly. There must be no squeamish sentimentalism about it. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that has now overtaken them. Their destruction will go hand in hand with the destruction of our enemies. We must hasten this process with cold ruthlessness.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1942 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 14 February 1942
“A judgment is being visited upon the Jews that, while barbaric, is fully deserved by them. The prophecy which the Führer made about them for having brought on a new world war is beginning to come true in a most terrible manner. One must not be sentimental in these matters. If we did not fight the Jews, they would destroy us. It's a life-and-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1942 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 27 March 1942
“Berndt reicht mir eine Ausarbeitung über die von uns zu betreibende okkultistische Propaganda ein. Hier wird in der Tat Einiges geleistet. Die Amerikaner und Engländer fallen ja vorzüglich auf eine solche Art von Propaganda herein. Wir nehmen alle irgendwie zur Verfügung stehenden Kronzeugen der okkulten Weissagung als Mithelfer in Anspruch. Nostradamus muß wieder einmal daran glauben.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1942 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 19 May 1942 concerning the use of Nostradamus's famous "Hister" quatrain
“I have devoted exhaustive study to the Protocols of Zion. In the past objection was always made that they were not suited to present day propaganda. In reading them now I find that we can use them very well. The Protocols of Zion are as modern today as they were when published the first time! At noon I mentioned this to the Führer. He believed the protocols to be absolutely genuine!”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) said by 1945 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is rotten and dismal that a world of so many hundred million people should be ruled by a single caste that has the power to lead millions to life or to death, indeed on a whim...This caste has spun its web over the entire earth; capitalism recognizes no national boundaries...Capitalism has learned nothing from recent events and wants to learn nothing, because it places its own interests ahead of those of the other millions. Can one blame those millions for standing up for their own interests, and only for those interests? Can one blame them for striving to forge an international community whose purpose is the struggle against corrupt capitalism? Can one condemn a large segment of the educated Stürmer youth for protesting against the greatest ability? Is it not an abomination that people with the most brilliant intellectual gifts should sink into poverty and disintegrate, while others dissipate, squander, and waste the money that could help them? … You say the old propertied class also worked hard for what it has. Granted, that may be true in many cases. But do you also know about the conditions under which workers were living during the period when capitalism “earned” its fortune?”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Anka Stalherm (14 April 1920), quoted in Ralph Georg Reuth, Goebbels (Harvest, 1994), pp. 33-34
“You praise Russia as the country of international solidarity and admit yourself that today Russia is more Russian than ever. What you call Bolshevist internationalism of Moscow is Pan-Slavism in its clearest and most pronounced form… Russia, Russian Bolshevism, are not about to collapse. But the Russian soviet system does not endure because it is Bolshevist, because it is Marxist, because it is international, but because it is national, because it is Russia. No Tsar ever grasped the Russian people in its depths, in its passion, in its national instincts as Lenin has. He gave the Russian peasants what Bolshevism always meant to the peasants: freedom and property. In this way he made the most indigenous group, the peasants, into the real supporters of the new system. The more the Russian peasants hates the Jew, especially the Soviet Jew, the more passionately is he a follower of agrarian reform, the more ardently does he love his country, his land and his soil. ‘Down with the Jewish Soviets, long live the Leninist agrarian reform!’”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1925 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Nationalsozialismus oder Bolschewismus? (National Socialism or Bolshevism), open letter to “My Friends on the Left,” Nationalsozialistische Briefe (National Socialist Letters), (Oct. 15, 1925); Nazi Ideology before 1933…
“You talk of socialism! Is it not right for the German worker, after the past 60 years have proven the complete bankruptcy of his political ideal, to feel despair about socialism and the future of his class?” “Never! Because: 1. He fought for 60 years not for socialism, but for Marxism. Marxism, whose theories are fatal to peoples and races, is the exact opposite of living socialism. 2. Marxism was never the political idea of a German worker. He only accepted this jumble of Jewish ideas because he had no other choice in his struggle for the freedom of his class. 3. Marxism is the death not only of nationally-minded peoples, but above all of the class that fights with total devotion for its realization: the working class. The worker has no right to doubt socialism, but rather the duty to doubt Marxism. The sooner he does that, the better. The clock has almost struck midnight.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1927 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Der Nazi-Sozi, Elberfeld: Verlag der Nationalsozialistischen Briefe, (1927)
“You make a lot of noise about the fact that you oppose the Jews. Isn’t anti-Semitism outdated in the twentieth century? Isn’t the Jew a human being like everyone else? Aren’t there decent Jews? Isn’t it bad that we 60 million fear 2 million Jews?” “You miss the point. Try to think logically: 1. If we were only anti-Semites, we would be out-of-place in the twentieth century. However, we are also socialists. For us, the two go together. Socialism, the freedom of the German proletariat and thereby of the German nation, can only be achieved against the Jews. Since we want Germany’s freedom, or socialism, we are anti-Semites. 2. Sure, the Jew is also a human being. None of us has every doubted that. But a flea is also an animal, — albeit an unpleasant one. Since a flea is not a pleasant animal, we have no duty to defend and protect it, to be of service to it so that it can bite and torment and torture us. Rather, our duty is to make it harmless. The same is true of the Jew. 3. Sure, there are decent (weiße) Jews. More of them very day. That however, is not evidence for the Jews, but rather it is evidence against them. The fact that one calls scoundrels among us decent ‘Jews’ is proof that to be Jewish carries a stigma, else one would call deceitful Jews ‘decent (gelbe) Christians.’ The fact that there are so many decent Jews proves that the destructive Jewish spirit has already infected wide circles of our people. It is encouragement for us to carry on the battle against the Jewish world plague wherever possible. 4. It is a bad sign for you, not for us, that 60 million fear 2 million Jews. We do not fear these 2 million Jews, but rather we fight against them. You, however, are too much of a coward to join this battle, and behave like a cat on a hot stove. If these 60 million fought the Jews as we do, they would have nothing more to fear. It would be the Jews’ turn to fear.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1927 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Der Nazi-Sozi, Elberfeld: Verlag der Nationalsozialistischen Briefe, (1927)
“To attract people, to win over people to that which I have realised as being true, that is called propaganda. In the beginning there is the understanding, this understanding uses propaganda as a tool to find those men, that shall turn understanding into politics. Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things from what I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths. Those are found in other circumstances, I find them when thinking at my desk, but not in the meeting hall.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1928 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech on 9 January 1928 to an audience of party members at the "Hochschule für Politik", a series of training talks for Nazi party members in Berlin
“We do not want a bourgeois state. We do not want a proletarian state. We want Germany! The nation is the last and the greatest thing, the individual is nothing before it. But this nation is only completely united when every individual has his place in it. It is only a community of destiny when the 30 million from the left are part of it as a German working community rooted in its land… We are socialist because we do not want to fight for the rights of our enslaved comrades as gifts given voluntarily or even involuntarily. We are socialist because we see those rights as a state necessity and as national justice.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) said by 1945 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This city is grey and miserable. The houses are covered with soot, the people grave and taciturn. Black masses move along the streets; meager and pale faces, the necks bend down. Children are sitting at the street corners, begging. In front of the shops women are standing with old, grey faces. Night falls. The discharge tubes ignite. Light shines down on misery and filth. My heart wrenches. Whores and pimps are dragging themselves through the small and narrow lanes. Yonder red lights are glowing. The evening seems to spread black wings over the city. Richness and misery are living close to each other. It makes you feel like crying.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) said by 1945 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are socialists because we see the social question as a matter of necessity and justice for the very existence of a state for our people, not a question of cheap pity or insulting sentimentality. The worker has a claim to a living standard that corresponds to what he produces. We have no intention of begging for that right… Since the political powers of the day are neither willing nor able to create such a situation, socialism must be fought for. It is a fighting slogan both inwardly and outwardly. It is aimed domestically at the bourgeois parties and Marxism at the same time, because both are sworn enemies of the coming workers’ state. It is directed abroad at all powers that threaten our national existence and thereby the possibility of the coming socialist national state.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1932 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Those Damn Nazis: Why Are We Socialists?” written by Joseph Goebbels and Mjölnir, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken, Nazi propaganda pamphlet (Munich: Verlag Frz. Eher, 1932)
“On this day the whole nation at all levels, in all its professions, occupations, and estates, acknowledges the dignity and blessedness of labour. On a day when in former times we heard the rattles of machine-guns and the hate-inspired songs of the class struggle and the Internationale, in this first year of Hitler’s government and the German people is assembled in unanimous, unswerving loyalty to the state, the race (Volk), and the German nation to which we all belong. Every difference is wiped away. The barriers of class hatred and the arrogance of social status that for over 50 years divided the nation from itself have been torn down. Germans of all classes, tribes (Stämme), professions, and denominations have joined hands across the barriers that separated them and have vowed henceforth to live as a community, to work and fight for the fatherland that unites us all. … The class struggle is at an end. The idea of the national community rises above the ruins of the bankrupt liberal-capitalist state. … Thus the German people marches into the future.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1933 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at the first Labor Day celebration held under Nazi auspices (1 May 1933) Sheri Berman, Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancient Regime to the Present Day, New York, Oxford University Press, (2019) p…
“International communism would entirely do away with all national and racial qualities which are founded in human nature itself; in property it sees the most primary cause of the break-down of world trade in the capitalist system. Accordingly it exploits this through an extensive and carefully organised and brutal system of action, setting aside personal values and sacrificing the individual to a hollow mass-idol that is only a travesty of actual life itself. At the same time it ignores and destroys all the idealistic and higher strivings of men and nations, through its own crass and empty materialist principles. On the other hand, National Socialism sees in all these things—in property, in personal values and in nation and race and the principles of idealism—these forces which carry on every human civilisation and fundamentally determine its worth.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1935 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at the Nazi party Congress at Nuremberg (September 1935)
“How deeply the perverse Jewish spirit has penetrated German cultural life is shown in the frightening and horrifying forms of the Exhibition Of Degenerate Art in München ….. This has nothing at all to do with the suppression of artistic freedom and modem progress. On the contrary, the botched art works which were exhibited there and their creators are of yesterday and before yesterday. They are the senile representatives, no longer to be taken seriously, of a period that we have intellectually and politically overcome and whose monstrous, degenerate creations still haunt the field of the plastic arts in our time.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1937 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Von der Großmacht zur Weltmacht on the seizure of thousands of works of German art. (26 November 1937)
“The fact that the causes and effective potentialities of Bolshevism were already existent in a latent form in democracy explains why Bolshevism flourishes only on democratic soil, and is indeed generally the inevitable consequence of a radical and excessively democratic conception of the State. Bolshevism allegedly makes a classless society its aim. The equality of whatever bears a human form, which democracy applied only to political and social life, is set up as a ruling principle for economic life also. In this respect there are supposed to be no differences left. But this equality of all individuals in respect of economic goods can, in the Marxist-Bolshevist view, result only from a brutal and pitiless class struggle. ... It is only logical that in connexion with this, Bolshevism should proclaim the equality of nations and races. ... The opposition between the democratic and the Bolshevist mentality and conception of the State are in the last resort merely theoretical, and here we have the answer to the mysterious riddle which overshadows Europe and the explanation both of the opposition in the lives of nations to-day and of the things which they have in common. It enables us to see at once why democracy and Bolshevism, which in the eyes of the world are irrevocably opposed to one another, meet again and again on common ground in their joint hatred of and attacks on authoritarian nationalist concepts of State and State systems. For the authoritarian nationalist conception of the State represents something essentially new. In it the French Revolution is superseded.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1938 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On National-Socialism, Bolshevism & Democracy (September 10, 1938)
“England is a capitalist democracy. Germany is a socialist people's state. And it is not the case that we think England is the richest land on earth. There are lords and City men in England who are in fact the richest men on earth. The broad masses, however, see little of this wealth. We see in England an army of millions of impoverished, socially enslaved, and oppressed people. Child labor is still a matter of course there. They have only heard about social welfare programs. Parliament occasionally discusses social legislation. Nowhere else is there such terrible and horrifying inequality as in the English slums. Those with good breeding take no notice of it. Should anyone speak of it in public, the press, which serves plutocratic democracy, quickly brands him the worst kind of rascal. They do not hesitate to make major changes in the Constitution if they are necessary to preserve capitalist democracy.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Englands Schuld,” Illustrierter Beobachter, Sondernummer, p. 14. The article is not dated, but is from the early months of the war, likely late fall of 1939. Joseph Goebbels’ speech in English is titled “England's Guilt.
“The sin of bourgeois patriotism was to confound a certain economic form with the national. It connected two things that are entirely different. Forms of the economy, however firm they may seem, are changeable. The national is eternal. If I mix the eternal and the temporal, the eternal will necessarily collapse when the temporal collapses. This was the real cause for the collapse of liberal society. It was rooted not in the eternal, but in the temporal, and when the temporal declined it took the eternal down with it. Today it is only an excuse for a system that brings growing economic misery. That is the only reason why international Jewry organizes the battle of the proletarian forces against both powers, the economy and the nation, and defeat them.”
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) said by 1945 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source