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."

"Everything is what you make of it, even yourself."

"One only honours what one conquers or defends."

"1920. Both of us were about to capitulate facing spiritual breakdown. Then we helped each other to stand tall and did not falter. My answer was: Resistance!"

"1927. I stood in front of your grave; in radiating sunshine there was a still, green mound. And it was preaching about mortality. My answer was: resurrection."

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

"1923. You challenged your fate. To surmount or to die! It was not yet time. Therefore you became a victim. Your answer was: Death!"

"Thus, we see from Lenin and his industrial reform that no salvation can come to the German people from this side, because communism, Marxism, as an ally of the Jewish stock market swindlers, never wants real freedom. It needs compliant slaves for its system of exploitation, but no free people for its plans for world domination. Real freedom means its end."

"Simply stated: capital and capitalism are two different things. The struggle is against capitalism, not capital. It is not the fact that there are factories, that there are mining assets, that is to blame for our misery, but rather the way in which they are managed and exploited contrary to the people’s welfare. Capitalism is the immoral distribution of capital. Marxism is Jewish there, too; it fights national capital in order to make it capitalism. Its theory is demagogic. Its practice is devastating."

"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."

"Industrial reform in Russia took place as Karl Marx had suggested. They actually tried to merge industry and the state. It failed. The Russian worker got rid of his Russian bloodsuckers — to leave the field to the Jew. Today the Jew is the master of Russia, Jewish capital rules, the Russian is a slave to stock market dictatorship."

"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."

"Marxism did not want socialism at all because the men stood and stand behind it preached phases of freedom, peace, and prosperity, but did not want social liberation at all, only using the workers as willing slaves for their purposes!... What we call National Socialism is the result of bourgeois betrayal of the national idea and Marxist betrayal of the socialist idea."

"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."

"How does Lenin tackle the agrarian problem? He expropriates all land and gives it to the Russian peasant as property. Not directly. He leases the land to him for 99 years. But the Russian peasant today regards land as his property. In doing so, Lenin slaps the Marxist doctrine in the face. It calls for the socialization of the means of production. Lenin sacrifices Marx and gives in to the Russian peasant’s insistence on his own soil."

"The socialism we want has nothing to do with international Marxist-Jewish egalitarianism. We want socialism as a doctrine of the community."

"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?"

"Communism. Jewry. I am a German Communist."

"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."

"Lenin was the greatest man, second only to Hitler, and that the difference between communism and the Hitler faith was very slight."

"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."

"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."

"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.”"

"Production that is essentially completed, which no longer requires strength, ability, inventiveness, entrepreneurship and brilliance (e.g., the transportation system, trusts, conglomerates) will be brought back to state ownership."

"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 socialists, because we see in socialism, that means, in the fateful dependence of all folk comrades upon each other, the sole possibility for the preservation of our racial genetics and thus the re-conquest of our political freedom and for the rejuvenation of the German state."

"Socialism is only achievable in a state that is internally united and externally free. Both goals, internal unity and external freedom, have been lost to us through the fault of bourgeoisie and Marxism. Both these groups, as national and social as they may deport themselves, are the mortal enemies of a socialist national state… Against the political bourgeoisie: for genuine nationalism! Against Marxism: for genuine socialism!"

"The eight hour work day is one of the most justified demands of the workers… Nobody who feels even just a trace of social feeling within himself will be able to stand aloof from the moral as well as the social-political justification for this demand. Well, work, as is known, is not an end in itself, rather only a means to an end."

"We are not a charitable institution but a Party of revolutionary socialists."

"The firmer the republic takes its subjects in tax forced labor and tribute duty, the louder it talks about the rights of the republicans. National Socialism puts an end to that: for it, each state citizen must assume duties toward the state corresponding to his abilities, but every assumed duty conditions a right. The more duties, the more rights."

"Capitalism assumes unbearable forms at the moment when the personal purposes that it serves run contrary to the interest of the overall folk. It then proceeds from things and not from people. Money is then the axis around which everything revolves. It is the reverse with socialism. The socialist worldview begins with the folk and then goes over to things. Things are made subservient to the folk; the socialist puts the folk above everything, and things are only means to an end."

"Never in world history has a new worldview—and socialism is such a thing—triumphed in capitulation, always only in resistance, in attack. In 1918 there was only one task for the German socialist: to keep the weapons and defend German socialism. One did not do that. One talked and made resolutions, and the German worker did not notice at all that in the process he just held the stirrups of his bitterest enemy, world money."

"The system of liberal capitalist democracy is already so rotten inside that there is nothing left to mend or reform. It must be fundamentally destroyed, shattered spiritually and in terms of power politics, so that a young, new generation can build a future on the ruins of the past."

"Nationally, the ruling class is failing. They sit in their mouse holes and let the storm roar over them. Socialism chases Marxism away. It gladly and willingly allows itself to be taken in tow by international Jewish capitalist interests. That was not a revolution! It was mutiny, it was a miserable, pathetic, cowardly stock market revolt!"

"The will to freedom rises up from the collapsing system. It finds its form in fundamentally new ideas: in Bolshevism and National Socialism. Both emerge with the ultimate belief that they will bring freedom to an entire world by overthrowing it. Bolshevism and National Socialism are embodied in two people who lead a purposeful minority in the will to the future: Lenin and Hitler."

"A nation without a religion - that is like a man without breath."