Top 200 William L. Shirer Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “After December 1, horses, cows, and pigs not residing on regular farms are to get food cards too.”

— William L. Shirer

52. “Hitler reveled in his unique creation. “A symbol it really is!” he exclaims in Mein Kampf. “In red we see the social idea of the movement, in white the nationalist idea, in the swastika the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man.”20.”

— William L. Shirer

53. “From the Nazi firebrand dictator had come not brutal threats, as so many had expected, but sweetness and light. The world was enchanted.”

— William L. Shirer

54. “It is one of the great examples,” as Friedrich Meinecke, the eminent German historian, said, “of the singular and incalculable power of personality in historical life.”10.”

— William L. Shirer

55. “Henderson, Hitler lapsed into a typical display of sentimental hogwash, though.”

— William L. Shirer

56. “He had not even considered the military value to the West of Czechoslovakia’s thirty-five well-trained, well-armed divisions entrenched behind their strong mountain fortifications at a time when Britain could put only two divisions in France and when the German Army was incapable of fighting on two fronts and, according to the German generals, even incapable of penetrating the Czech defenses. Now.”

— William L. Shirer

57. “But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart – the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril and certainly in utter disdain of popularity or clamor.”

— William L. Shirer

58. “The Communist press and political meetings were suppressed; the Social Democrat newspapers and many liberal journals were suspended and the meetings of the democratic parties either banned or broken up. Only.”

— William L. Shirer

59. “In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on and uninhabited planet.”

— William L. Shirer

60. “In this period the Prime Minister had great confidence in the Fuehrer’s word, remarking privately a day or two later, “In spite of the hardness and ruthlessness I thought I saw in his face, I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.”46.”

— William L. Shirer

61. “Soviet foreign policy turns out to be as “imperialist” as that of the czars. The Kremlin has betrayed the revolution.”

— William L. Shirer

62. “Between the Left and the Right, Germany lacked a politically powerful middle class, which in other countries – in France, in England, in the United States – had proved to be the backbone of democracy.”

— William L. Shirer

63. “What is life? Life is the Nation. The individual must die anyway. Beyond the life of the individual is the Nation. But how can anyone be afraid of this moment of death, with which he can free himself from this misery, if his duty doesn’t chain him to this Vale of Tears.”

— William L. Shirer

64. “This government was Papen’s conception, his creation, and he was confident that with the help of the staunch old President, who was his friend, admirer and protector, and with the knowing support of his conservative colleagues, who outnumbered the obstreperous Nazis eight to three, he would dominate it.”

— William L. Shirer

65. “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

66. “The man with the Charlie Chaplin mustache, who had been a down-and-out tramp in Vienna in his youth, an unknown soldier of World War I, a derelict in Munich in the first grim postwar days, the somewhat comical leader of the Beer Hall Putsch, this spellbinder who was not even German but Austrian, and who was only forty-three years old, had just been administered the oath as Chancellor of the German Reich.”

— William L. Shirer

67. “We broadcast from coast to coast every utterance of Hitler, but the German people are not permitted to know a word of what Roosevelt speaks.”

— William L. Shirer

68. “What the King conquered, the Prince formed, the Field Marshal defended, the Soldier saved and unified.”

— William L. Shirer

69. “The wounded Goering was given first aid by the Jewish proprietor of a nearby bank.”

— William L. Shirer

70. “Among those elected that fall of 1946 was a little-known local judge, Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, to the Senate, and an even lesser known local politician in California, Richard M. Nixon, to the House. Both had accused their opponents of sympathy with Communism and of having “Communist” support. The voters had fallen for it, as they usually do in this country.”

— William L. Shirer

71. “A wonderful ferment was working in Germany. Life seemed more free, more modern, more exciting than in any place I had ever seen. Nowhere else did the arts or the intellectual life seem so lively. In contemporary writing, painting, architecture, in music and drama, there were new currents and fine talents. And everywhere there was an accent on youth.”

— William L. Shirer

72. “What they then wanted was an authoritarian Germany which at home would put an end to democratic “nonsense” and the power of the trade unions and in foreign affairs undo the verdict of 1918, tear off the shackles of Versailles, rebuild a great Army and with its military power restore the country to its place in the sun. These.”

— William L. Shirer

73. “The people were there, and the land – the first dazed and bleeding and hungry, and, when winter came, shivering in their rags in the hovels which the bombings had made of their homes; the second a vast wasteland of rubble. The German people had not been destroyed, as Hitler, who had tried to destroy so many other peoples and, in the end, when the war was lost, themselves, had wished.”

— William L. Shirer

74. “Much of what is going on and will go on could be learned by the outside world from Mein Kampf, the Bible and Koran together of the Third Reich. But – amazingly – there is no decent translation of it in English or French, and Hitler will not allow one to be made, which is understandable, for it would shock many in the West. How many visiting butter-and-egg men have I told that the Nazi goal is domination! They laughed.”

— William L. Shirer

75. “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

76. “Hassell noted down in his diary “the substance of his views”: “This man – Hitler – is Germany’s destiny for good and for evil. If he now goes over the abyss – which Fritsch believes he will – he will drag us all down with him. There is nothing we can do.”13.”

— William L. Shirer

77. “Contrary to the general opinion, he liked the company of women, especially if they were beautiful.”

— William L. Shirer

78. “This is bad luck for radio. Berlin reports Hitler has demanded – and Chamberlain more or less accepted – a plebiscite for the Sudeteners. The government here says it is out of the question. But they are afraid that is what happened at Berchtesgaden. In other words that Mr. Chamberlain has sold them down the river.”

— William L. Shirer

79. “The depression which spread over the world like a great conflagration toward the end of 1929 gave Adolf Hitler his opportunity, and he made the most of it. 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 war.”

— William L. Shirer

80. “Noble in form and in intent as all these neutral appeals were, there is something unreal and pathetic about them when reread today. It was as if the President of the United States, the Pope and the rulers of the small Northern European democracies lived on a different planet from that of the Third Reich and had no more understanding of what was going on in Berlin than of what might be transpiring on Mars.”

— William L. Shirer

81. “BERLIN, June 18 It’s in the bag, signed today in London. The Wilhelmstrasse quite elated. Germany gets a U-boat tonnage equal to Britain’s. Why the British have agreed to this is beyond me. German submarines almost beat them in the last war, and may in the next.”

— William L. Shirer

82. “But certain difficulties lay in his way if he were himself to lead the counterrevolution, and he was not much interested in it unless he was.”

— William L. Shirer

83. “As one reads Hegel one realizes how much inspiration Hitler, like Marx, drew from him, even if it was at second hand. Above all else, Hegel in his theory of “heroes,” those great agents who are.”

— William L. Shirer

84. “While surrender negotiations were under way – a Dutch officer had come to German headquarters near the bridge to discuss the details and was returning with the German terms – bombers appeared and wiped out the heart of the great city. Some eight hundred persons, almost entirely civilians, were massacred, several thousand wounded and 78,000 made homeless.”

— William L. Shirer

85. “Benito Mussolini, tired and senile though he was only going on sixty, he who had strutted so arrogantly across Europe’s stage for two decades, was at the end of his rope. When he returned to Rome he found much worse than the aftermath of the first heavy bombing.”

— William L. Shirer

86. “For the first few months in 1933, a few party radicals tried to get control of the business associations, take over the department stores and institute a corporate state.”

— William L. Shirer

87. “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

88. “The German generals began to read, or reread, Caulaincourt’s grim account of the French conqueror’s disastrous winter in Russia in 1812.”

— William L. Shirer

89. “Hitler had never made any secret of, was that if the party ever took over Germany it would stamp out a German’s personal freedom, including that of Dr. Schacht and his business friends.”

— William L. Shirer

90. “Some time after dinner a newsboy rushed into the lobby of the Ambassador with extra editions of a German-language paper, the only one I can read since I do not know Czech. The headlines said: Chamberlain to fly to Berchtesgaden tomorrow to see Hitler! The Czechs are dumbfounded. They suspect a sell-out and I’m afraid they’re right.”

— William L. Shirer

91. “A totalitarian dictatorship, by its very nature, works in great secrecy and knows how to preserve that secrecy from the prying eyes of outsiders.”

— William L. Shirer

92. “Hitler, in turn, was enraged by the world reaction and convinced himself that it merely proved the power and scope of “the Jewish world conspiracy.” In.”

— William L. Shirer

93. “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

94. “Prussia,” remarked Mirabeau, “is not a state with an army, but an army with a state.”

— William L. Shirer

95. “But not by Hermann Goering. He cheated the hangman. Two hours before his turn would have come he swallowed a vial of poison that had been smuggled into his cell. Like his Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, and his rival for the succession, Heinrich Himmler, he had succeeded at the last hour in choosing the way in which he would depart this earth, on which he, like the other two, had made such a murderous impact.”

— William L. Shirer

96. “The consequences of committing high treason, if you were a man of the extreme Right, were not unduly heavy, despite the law, and a good many antirepublicans took notice of it.”

— William L. Shirer

97. “Esser became so repulsive to some of the older and more decent men in the movement that they demanded his expulsion. “I know Esser is a scoundrel,” Hitler retorted in public, “but I shall hold on to him as long as he can be of use to me.”23 This was to be his attitude toward almost all of his close collaborators, no matter how murky their past – or indeed their present. Murderers, pimps, homosexual perverts, drug addicts or just plain rowdies were all the same to him if they served his purposes.”

— William L. Shirer

98. “Despite his feverish state of excitement he was in sufficient control of himself to realize that he lacked the strength to overcome the police and the Army.”

— William L. Shirer

99. “He, who was so monumentally intolerant by his very nature, was strangely tolerant of one human condition – a man’s morals. 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

100. “In 1918, after the last defeat, the Kaiser had fled, the monarchy had tumbled, but the other traditional institutions supporting the State had remained, a government chosen by the people had continued to function, as did the nucleus of a German Army and a General Staff. But in the spring of 1945 the Third Reich simply ceased to exist.”

— William L. Shirer