Top 200 William L. Shirer Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Perhaps America will one day go fascist democratically, by popular vote.”

— William L. Shirer

2. “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

3. “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

4. “History must speak for itself. A historian is content if he has been able to shed more light.”

— William L. Shirer

5. “Adolf Hitler, who was possessed of a demonic personality, a granite will, uncanny instincts, a cold ruthlessness, a remarkable intellect, a soaring imagination and – until toward the end, when, drunk with power and success, he overreached himself – an amazing capacity to size up people.”

— William L. Shirer

6. “Nietzsche put the idea this way: “Man shall be trained for war and woman for the procreation of the warrior. All else is folly.” He went further. In Thus Spake Zarathustra he exclaims: “Thou goest to woman? Do not forget thy whip!” – which.”

— William L. Shirer

7. “This of course was heresy to Hitler, who accused Otto Strasser of professing the cardinal sins of “democracy and liberalism.”

— William L. Shirer

8. “Most true happiness comes from one’s inner life, from the disposition of the mind and soul.”

— William L. Shirer

9. “LONDON, March 16 Ed telephoned from Vienna. He said Major Emil Fey has committed suicide after putting bullets through his wife and nineteen-year-old son. He was a sinister man. Undoubtedly he feared the Nazis would murder him for having double-crossed them in 1934 when Dollfuss was shot. I return to Vienna day after tomorrow. The crisis is over. I think we’ve found something, though, for radio with these round-ups.”

— 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. “Dietrich Eckart, twenty-one years older than Hitler, was often called the spiritual founder of National Socialism.”

— William L. Shirer

12. “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

13. “He came to three conclusions which explained to him the success of the Social Democrats: They knew how to create a mass movement, without which any political party was useless; they had learned the art of propaganda among the masses; and, finally, they knew the value of using what he calls “spiritual and physical terror.”

— William L. Shirer

14. “Deprived of his trade unions, collective bargaining and the right to strike, the German worker in the Third Reich became an industrial serf, bound to his master, the employer, much as medieval peasants had been bound to the lord of the manor. The so-called Labor Front, which in theory replaced the old trade unions, did not represent the worker.”

— William L. Shirer

15. “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

16. “Rommel hesitated and finally made his decision. “I believe,” he said to Stroelin, “it is my duty to come to the rescue of Germany.” At this meeting and at all subsequent ones which Rommel had with the plotters, he opposed assassinating Hitler – not on moral but on practical grounds. To kill the dictator, he argued, would be to make a martyr of him. He insisted that Hitler be arrested by the Army and haled before a German court for crimes against his own people and those of the occupied lands.12.”

— William L. Shirer

17. “If the French had then marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.”

— William L. Shirer

18. “The street gangs,” in the words of Alan Bullock, “had seized control of the resources of a great modern State, the gutter had come to power.” But – as Hitler never ceased to boast – “legally,” by an overwhelming vote of Parliament. The Germans had no one to blame but themselves.”

— William L. Shirer

19. “To some Germans and, no doubt, to most foreigners it appeared that a charlatan had come to power in Berlin. To the majority of Germans Hitler had – or would shortly assume – the aura of a truly charismatic leader. They were to follow him blindly, as if he possessed a divine judgment, for the next twelve tempestuous years.”

— William L. Shirer

20. “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

21. “They and the Army leaders, Ludendorff and Hindenburg, had pushed political power into the hands of the reluctant Social Democrats. In doing so they managed also to place on the shoulders of these democratic working-class leaders apparent responsibility for signing the surrender and ultimately the peace treaty, thus laying on them the blame for Germany’s defeat and for whatever suffering a lost war and a dictated peace might bring upon the German people.”

— William L. Shirer

22. “In the Third Reich every German girl will find a husband!”

— William L. Shirer

23. “The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it. At the crest of their popular strength, in July 1932, the National Socialists had attained but 37 per cent of the vote. But the 63 per cent of the German people who expressed their opposition to Hitler were much too divided and shortsighted to combine against a common danger which they must have known would overwhelm them unless they united, however temporarily, to stamp it out. The.”

— William L. Shirer

24. “Hitler’s scholastic failure rankled in him in later life, when he heaped ridicule on the academic “gentry,” their degrees and diplomas and their pedagogical airs. Even.”

— William L. Shirer

25. “The republican regime, as well as the Marxists and the Jews, was “the enemy.” And in his peroration he had shouted, “To this struggle of ours there are only two possible issues: either the enemy passes over our bodies or we pass over theirs!”

— William L. Shirer

26. “1933.” Farben scientists had saved Germany from early disaster in the First World War by the invention of a process to make synthetic nitrates from air after the country’s normal supply of nitrates from Chile was cut off by the British blockade.”

— William L. Shirer

27. “The failure of the duly elected government to build a new Army that would be faithful to its own democratic spirit and subordinate to the cabinet and the Reichstag was a fatal mistake for the Republic, as time would tell.”

— William L. Shirer

28. “I love books. They connect you with the past and the present, with original minds and noble spirits, with what living has been and meant to others. They instruct, inspire, shake you up, make you laugh and weep, think and dream. But while they do enhance experience, they are not a substitute for it.”

— William L. Shirer

29. “Not a gun was fired – not even by the Fascist militia – to save him. Not a voice was raised in his defense. No one seemed to mind the humiliating nature of his departure – being hauled away from the King’s presence to jail in an ambulance. On the contrary, there was general rejoicing at his fall. Fascism itself collapsed as easily as its founder.”

— William L. Shirer

30. “Hitler had unleashed a dynamic force of incalculable proportions which had long been pent up in the German people. To what purpose, he had already made clear in the.”

— William L. Shirer

31. “NUREMBERG, September 5 I’m beginning to comprehend, I think, some of the reasons for Hitler’s astounding success. Borrowing a chapter from the Roman church, he is restoring pageantry and colour and mysticism to the drab lives of twentieth-century Germans.”

— William L. Shirer

32. “There was some ground for this appropriation of Nietzsche as one of the originators of the Nazi Weltanschauung. Had not the philosopher thundered against democracy and parliaments, preached the will to power, praised war and proclaimed the coming of the master race and the superman – and in the most telling aphorisms?”

— William L. Shirer

33. “Every morning the editors of the Berlin daily newspapers and the correspondents of those published elsewhere in the Reich gathered at the Propaganda Ministry to be told by Dr. Goebbels or by one of his aides what news to print and suppress, how to write the news and headline it, what campaigns to call off or institute and what editorials were desired for the day. In.”

— William L. Shirer

34. “A crude Darwinism? A sadistic fancy? An irresponsible egoism? A megalomania? It was all of these in part. But it was something more. For the mind and the passion of Hitler – all the aberrations that possessed his feverish brain – had roots that lay deep in German experience and thought. Nazism and the Third Reich, in fact, were but a logical continuation of German history.”

— William L. Shirer

35. “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

36. “Although millions more had jobs, the share of all German workers in the national income fell from 56.9 per cent in the depression year of 1932 to 53.6 per cent in the boom year of 1938.”

— William L. Shirer

37. “Had the eighty-four-year-old wandering miller not made his unexpected reappearance to recognize the paternity of his thirty-nine-year-old-son nearly thirty years after the death of the mother, Adolf Hitler would have been born Adolf Schicklgruber. There may not be much or anything in the name, but I have heard Germans speculate whether Hitler could have become the master of Germany had he been known to the world as Schicklgruber.”

— William L. Shirer

38. “To sum up these three years: Personally, they have not been unhappy ones, though the shadow of Nazi fanaticism, sadism, persecution, regimentation, terror, brutality, suppression, militarism, and preparation for war has hung over all our lives, like a dark, brooding cloud that never clears.”

— William L. Shirer

39. “A people who had so lightly given up their political and cultural and economic freedoms were not, except for a relatively few, going to die or even risk imprisonment to preserve freedom of worship.”

— William L. Shirer

40. “It does not matter what you think,” he exclaims, “so long as you obey.”

— William L. Shirer

41. “Many of the books tossed into the flames in Berlin that night by the joyous students under the approving eye of Dr. Goebbels had been written by authors of world reputation.”

— William L. Shirer

42. “A Wilhelmstrasse official admitted to me today that the Germans had imposed forced labour on all Jews in Poland. He said the term of forced labour was “only two years.”16 A German school-teacher tells me this one: the instructors begin the day with this greeting to their pupils: “Gott strafe England!” – whereupon the children are supposed to answer: “He will.”

— William L. Shirer

43. “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

44. “At home, American critics of that system, especially in the American Medical Association, had derided British “socialized medicine” as impossible and unwanted. But this was not true. It was extremely popular among all classes, all parties. While I was in England, even the Conservative party, girding.”

— William L. Shirer

45. “This paralysis of the mind and will of grown-up men, raised as Christians, supposedly disciplined in the old virtues, boasting of their code of honor, courageous in the face of death on the battlefield, is astonishing, though perhaps it can be grasped if one remembers the course of German history, outlined in an earlier chapter, which made blind obedience to temporal rulers the highest virtue of Germanic man and put a premium on servility.”

— William L. Shirer

46. “The Reichstag would be asked to pass an “enabling act” conferring on Hitler’s cabinet exclusive legislative powers for four years. Put even more simply, the German Parliament would be requested to turn over its constitutional functions to Hitler and take a long vacation. But.”

— William L. Shirer

47. “It was known that he demanded, and received, a high fee for the many articles which he wrote in those days for the impoverished Nazi press. There was much grumbling in party circles over the high cost of Hitler. These.”

— William L. Shirer

48. “Roosevelt: “Please for the sake of the future, nail every Communist.”

— William L. Shirer

49. “Coffee, ever since it became impossible to buy it in Germany, has assumed a weird importance in one’s life.”

— William L. Shirer

50. “Despite all the terror and intimidation, the majority of them rejected Hitler.”

— William L. Shirer