Joseph Goebbels Quotes

Anyone who makes plans for after the revolution is a reactionary.

Without a revolutionary theory there cannot be a revolutionary movement.

We studied Western journalists' reporting methods, fed them story ideas, steered them toward sympathetic interviewees, and supplied them with the revolutionary movement's facts and figures.

Many people here are completely unsuitable for shaping public opinion. I am going to weed them out.

The revolution will stop at nothing. We have changed the nature of politics.

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

The only books on revolution were published by communists.

Everyone in politics turns to the press, if only to manipulate it or deflect it.

In order to govern you have to feed the news cycle

The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt Administration. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and out government.

In the case of Stalinism, people actually distorted science because it was for the good of the Communist Party.

Radicals don't care about the institutions. They are looking for an ideological crusade. Traditions don't matter.

How did it happen that an enlightened country like Germany was pulled into Nazism? That question has occupied me since 'The Tin Drum,' my first book. The story also shows that we can never know how a person's life will unfold; there is no guarantee that a person will do what is right and avoid what is not right.

One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

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

The strategies and assumptions [of the propaganda model] are fundamentally contrary to a democratic model.... The goal of the propaganda model is simply to achieve efficient indoctrination, and it therefore tends to regard the assumptions of the democratic model as inconvenient obstacles to efficient communication.

The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them

One of the best ways of enslaving a people is to keep them from education... The second way of enslaving a people is to suppress the sources of information, not only by burning books but by controlling all the other ways in which ideas are transmitted.

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

The distortion of accuracy and loss of trust among a wider public that looks at biased news coverage, smells a rat, and switches off is only part of the danger. The other, more sinister, side of the equation is that any old despot can ensure favourable coverage of his regime, so long as he presents a properly anti-Western front…. When news judgments are clouded by a warmed-over postmodernism that filters every conflict through a cloudy lens of class and power struggles, and where the US is the worst bad guy of all, totalitarians and terrorists turn the West's hard-won free press into their own ministry of propaganda.

You must fight not only against open fascism but also against concealed fascism which parades under the mask of “socialism.”

Nowadays, we seldom remember that the totalitarianism that emerged early this century was thought to embody, above all, modernity and technology.

Nothing to bother about, the man was a Bolshevik.

The secret to modern propaganda is to simplify and repeat.