Joseph Goebbels
133 quotes
Biography
"Faith moves mountains, but only knowledge moves them to the right place..."
"The social is a stopgap. Socialism is the ideology of the future."
"You and I, we are fighting each other but we are not really enemies. By doing so we are dividing our strength, and we shall never reach our goal. Maybe the final extremity will bring us together. Maybe."
"Yesterday you beat about the bush on the Jewish question. I know why. Please don’t object. We don’t want to deceive each other. You are an anti-Semite as I am. You don’t yet want to admit this to yourself. The Jew can at best exist in Communism. The Jew in a national-Bolshevist state is an absurdity."
"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!’"
"Lenin sacrificed Marx and instead gave Russia freedom. You want to sacrifice German freedom for Marx. Even the Bolshevik Jew has clearly recognized the compelling necessity of the Russian national state and has early and wisely adjusted himself to it."
"Rußland ... einst im Geiste seines größten Denkers, im Geiste Dostojewskis erwachen wird."
"Der uns von Natur gegebene Bundesgenosse gegen die teuflische Versuchung und Korruption des Westens ist."
"Therefore, Russia is our natural ally against the devilish temptation and corruption of the west."
"Stock-exchange capital is not productive but parasitically hoarded capital. It is no longer tied to the soil but rootless and internationalist; it does not produce but has infiltrated the normal production process in order to drain profits from it. It consist of movable assets, i.e. raw cash; its chief carrier is Jewish high finance, whose goal is to put the producing populace to work, then pocket the proceeds from their labor."
"Communism is nothing but a grotesque distortion of true Socialist thought. We and we alone could become the genuine Socialists in Germany, or for that matter, in Europe."
"We will never get anywhere, if we lean on the interests of the cultured and propertied classes. Everything will come to us if we appeal to the hunger and despair of the masses."
"That is why we place ourselves alongside Russia as equal partners in the struggle for this freedom which means everything to us."
"The money pigs of capitalist democracy… Money has made slaves of us… Money is the curse of mankind. It smothers the seed of everything great and good. Every penny is sticky with sweat and blood."
"One class has fulfilled its historical mission and is about to yield to another. The bourgeoisie has to yield to the working class ... Whatever is about to fall should be pushed. We are all soldiers of the revolution. We want the workers' victory over filthy lucre. That is socialism."
"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."
"We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with democracy’s weapons. If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem... We are coming neither as friends or neutrals. We come as enemies! As the wolf attacks the sheep, so come we."
"The political bourgeoisie is about to leave the stage of history. In its place advance the oppressed producers of the head and hand, the forces of Labor (Arbeitertum), to being their historical mission."
"We are not a charitable institution but a Party of revolutionary socialists."
"I dedicate this book to the memory of my friend Richard Flisges, who died as a brave soldier of work in a mine at Schliersee on the 19th of July 1923."
"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."
"I'm looking for the teacher who is simple enough to be great, and great enough to be simple."
"Everything is what you make of it, even yourself."
"One only honours what one conquers or defends."
"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."