Top 43 William Shirer Quotes
#1. It is doubtful if a more extensive anthology of errors (William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich) concerning the personality and policies of Hitler and the causes and responsibility for the Second World War has ever been assembled, even in war time.
Harry Elmer Barnes
#2. The Nazi regime intended eventually to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists.
William L. Shirer
#3. One of them was Fritz Thyssen, one of the earliest and biggest contributors to the party. Fleeing the "Nazi regime has ruined German industry." And to all he met abroad he proclaimed, "What a fool ( Dummkopf ) I was!
William L. Shirer
#4. Demonstrated that the more you owed a country the more business you did with it.
William L. Shirer
#5. The power which has always started the greatest religious and political avalanches in history rolling has from time immemorial been the magic power of the spoken word, and that alone. The broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech.
William L. Shirer
#6. Surely the Germans must be the ugliest-looking people in Europe, individually. Not a decent-looking woman in the whole Linden. Their awful clothes probably contribute to one's impression.
William L. Shirer
#7. But the fact remains that according to the testimony of one of his own Nazi followers in the column, the physician Dr. Walther Schulz, which was supported by several other witnesses, Hitler "was the first to get up and turn back," leaving his dead and wounded comrades lying in the street. He
William L. Shirer
#8. All the good things on this earth are trophy cups. The strong win them. The weak lose them.
from a speech by the Nazi Minister of Education
William L. Shirer
#9. The government [Hitler promised] will make use of these powers only insofar as they are essential for carrying out vitally necessary measures. Neither
William L. Shirer
#10. The middle classes, grown prosperous by the belated but staggering development of the industrial revolution and dazzled by the success of Bismarck's policy of force and war, had traded for material gain any aspirations for political freedom they may have had.
William L. Shirer
#11. Most true happiness comes from one's inner life, from the disposition of the mind and soul. Admittedly, a good inner life is difficult to achieve, especially in these trying times. It takes reflection and contemplation and self-discipline.
William L. Shirer
#12. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, A History of Nazi Germany, by William L. Shirer, Simon and Schuster, 1960, New York; Hitler, a Study in Tyranny, by Alan Bullock, Harper, 1953, New York;
Philip K. Dick
#14. No other party in Germany came near to attracting so many shady characters. As we have seen, a conglomeration of pimps, murderers, homosexuals, alcoholics and blackmailers flocked to the party as if to a natural haven. Hitler did not care, as long as they were useful to him.
William L. Shirer
#16. Himmler announced today that a Polish farm labourer had been hanged for sleeping with a German woman. No race pollution is to be permitted. Another
William L. Shirer
#17. A gigantic crowd of one million persons was gathered on the Maifeld to hear the two fascist dictators speak their pieces. Mussolini, orating in German, was carried away by the deafening applause - and by Hitler's flattering words.
William L. Shirer
#18. Henderson, Hitler lapsed into a typical display of sentimental hogwash, though
William L. Shirer
#20. Thus was parliamentary democracy finally interred in Germany. Except for the arrests of the Communists and some of the Social Democratic deputies, it was all done quite legally, though accompanied by terror. Parliament
William L. Shirer
#21. Like most great revolutionaries he could thrive only in evil times, at first when the masses were unemployed, hungry and desperate, and later when they were intoxicated by
William L. Shirer
#22. But they were now on that April morning determined to use them - the first time and the last in the history of the Third Reich that the Jews resisted their Nazi oppressors with arms.
William L. Shirer
#23. He frequently lost all self-control and his language grew increasingly violent. In his intimate circle he now found no restraining influence.47
William L. Shirer
#24. History must speak for itself. A historian is content if he has been able to shed more light.
William L. Shirer
#25. Since Kemal's death, Turkey has been ruled by small minds, unsteady, weak men.
William L. Shirer
#26. On May 17, 1933, before the Reichstag, Hitler delivered his "Peace Speech," one of the greatest of his career, a masterpiece of deceptive propaganda that deeply moved the German people and unified them behind him and which made a profound and favorable impression on the outside world.
William L. Shirer
#27. In his case, what had been hardness became cruelty, while a tendency to bluff became plain dishonesty. He often lied without hesitation and assumed that others lied to him.
William L. Shirer
#28. I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state ... a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one's mind and often misled it.
William L. Shirer
#29. Soviet foreign policy turns out to be as "imperialist" as that of the czars. The Kremlin has betrayed the revolution.
William L. Shirer
#30. Three youths in Hanover who snatched a lady's handbag in the black-out have been sentenced to death.
William L. Shirer
#31. Perhaps America will one day go fascist democratically, by popular vote.
William L. Shirer
#32. And many returned who if they were not converted were at least rendered tolerant of the "new Germany" and believed that they had seen, as they said, "positive achievements.
William L. Shirer
#33. The Olympic games held in Berlin in August 1936 afforded the Nazis a golden opportunity to impress the world with the achievements of the Third Reich, and they made the most of it.
William L. Shirer
#34. The Third Reich which was born on January 30, 1933, Hitler boasted, would endure for a thousand years,
William L. Shirer
#35. they knew also that the Communist underground was directed from Moscow and served chiefly as an espionage source for the Russians.*
William L. Shirer
#36. The racial laws which excluded the Jews from the German community seemed to a foreign observer to be a shocking throwback to primitive times, but since the Nazi racial theories exalted the Germans as the salt of the earth and the master race they were far from being unpopular. A
William L. Shirer
#37. The goose-step has always seemed to me to be an outlandish exhibition of the human being in his most undignified and stupid state.
William L. Shirer
#38. story of the Nazi plot to kidnap the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and induce the former King of England to work with Hitler for a peace settlement with Great Britain.
William L. Shirer
#39. All this was made clear enough to the assembled industrialists and they responded with enthusiasm to the promise of the end of the infernal elections, of democracy and disarmament.
William L. Shirer
#40. It was at this time that he published an open letter to a Communist leader assuring him that Nazism and Communism were really the same thing.
William L. Shirer
#41. No class or group or party in Germany could escape its share of responsibility for the abandonment of the democratic Republic and the advent of Adolf Hitler. The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it.
William L. Shirer
#42. The Germans, if one may risk a generalization, have a weakness for blaming foreigners for their failures.
William L. Shirer
#43. Hitler delivered petulant speeches that fall warning the outside world and particularly the British to mind their own business and to quit concerning themselves "with the fate of Germans within the frontiers of the Reich.
William L. Shirer
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