Joseph Goebbels Quotes

A good government can no more exist without propaganda than propaganda can exist without a good government.

The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power.

They who have put out the people's eyes reproach them for their blindness.

Believe me, Winston, that hat fits you perfectly. You are going gradually have to get used to me leading you.

The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.

It may be true that you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.

In a democracy, as a matter of course, every effort is made to seize upon and create publick opinion, which is, substantially, securing power.

The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

If men's minds were as easily controlled as their tongues, every king would sit safely on his throne

The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen, and the far spread magazine, rules the country.

Why can't the Indonesians have an Islamic theocracy if they want? Why can't the Pakistanis have a military dictatorship? Why can't the Serbs run their own country the way they prefer? What is the appeal in making sure that people whose minds have been wasted by Alzheimer's Disease vote? Well, let's not beat around the bush: the appeal of mass democracy lies in the fact that in essentially every country in the world today, the number of persons unable to think for themselves is substantially larger than the number able to make independent decisions. Those unable to think for themselves have their thinking done for them by the people who control the mass media. Which is to say, democracy is the preferred system because it gives the political power to those who own or control the mass media and at the same time allows them to remain behind the scenes and evade responsibility for the way in which they use that power.

What is new in our time is the increased power of the authorities to enforce their prejudices.

Any excuse will serve a tyrant.

Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.

Fear is the foundation of most governments.

Let the people think they govern and they will be governed.

The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.

The essence of American politics consists of the manipulation of populism by elitism.

The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. But, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and the war aims and operating plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play. There is no more appalling caricature of freedom of thought. Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it is permitted, but no one is capable of it any more. Now people want to think only what they are supposed to want to think, and this they consider freedom.

Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.

Give people control of the media and they will use it. Don’t give them control and you will lose it.

We can learn a lot from these Bolsheviks—most of all in the use of propaganda.

I set the propaganda machine in motion. Now we will see what the apparatus will do.

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 it's powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the State.

Ever since Gutenberg, every dynasty, every political leader, every major religion, has recognized that to control the media is to have a powerful instrument for controlling the values and behavior of a population.