Joseph Goebbels Quotes

Nationalism is more wide-reaching than internationalism.

We are the world’s Pariah not because we do not have the courage to resist, but rather because out entire national energy is wasted in eternal and unproductive squabbling between the right and the left.

Bourgeois patriotism is the privilege of a class.

The nation is the organic union of a people to protect its life.

Germany, on the other hand, has based its domestic policies on new and modern social principles. That is why it is a danger to English plutocracy. It is also why English capitalists want to destroy Hitlerism. They see Hitlerism as all the generous social reforms that have occurred in Germany since 1933. The English plutocrats rightly fear that good things are contagious, that they could endanger English capitalism.

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.

We have modernized and ennobled the concept of democracy. With us it means definitely the rule of the people, in accordance with its origin. We have given the principle of Socialism a new meaning. ... Never have we left anyone in doubt that National-Socialism is not for export. ... We do not aim at world domination, but we do intend to defend our country, and it is our new conceptions which give us the inexhaustible and ever-renewed strength to do so.

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.

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.”

We did not complain in the past because Germany was not rearmed. We complain now because we are strong enough to do so.

subhumans exist in every people as a leavening agent

Joseph Goebbels, "Warum sind wir Judengegner?", Der Angriff. Aufsätze aus der Kampfzeit (1935), Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, pp. 329–331

He who thinks as a German must despise the Jew. The one determines the other.

"Der Jude," Der Angriff. Aufsätze aus der Kampfzeit (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1935)

He who defends the Jew harms his own people.