Top 200 William L. Shirer Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “As Hitler had told an audience some months before, “The National Socialist Movement will in the future ruthlessly prevent – if necessary by force – all meetings or lectures that are likely to distract the minds of our fellow countrymen.”19.”

— William L. Shirer

108. “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

109. “But the Third Reich owed nothing to the fortunes of war or to foreign influence. It was inaugurated in peacetime, and peacefully, by the Germans themselves, out of both their weaknesses and their strengths. The Germans imposed the Nazi tyranny on themselves.”

— William L. Shirer

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “The man who founded the Third Reich, who ruled it ruthlessly and often with uncommon shrewdness, who led it to such dizzy heights and to such a sorry end, was a person of undoubted, if evil, genius.”

— William L. Shirer

114. “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

115. “That philosophy, however demented, had roots, as we have seen, deep in German life. The blueprint may have seemed preposterous to most twentieth-century minds, even in Germany. But it too possessed a certain logic. It held forth a vision. It offered, though few saw this at the time, a continuation of German history. It pointed the way toward a glorious German destiny.”

— William L. Shirer

116. “If Chamberlain was right and honorable in appeasing Hitler in September 1938 by sacrificing Czechoslovakia, was Stalin wrong and dishonorable in appeasing the Fuehrer a year later at the expense of Poland, which had shunned Soviet help anyway?”

— William L. Shirer

117. “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. Yet in one respect he was unique among history’s revolutionaries: He intended to make his revolution after achieving political power.”

— William L. Shirer

118. “At the first meeting, Schlabrendorff says, he had an opportunity to examine Hitler’s oversize cap. He was struck by its weight. On examination it proved to be lined with three and a half pounds of steel plating.”

— William L. Shirer

119. “But without Adolf Hitler, who was possessed of a demonic personality, a granite will, uncanny instincts, a cold ruthlessness, a remarkable.”

— William L. Shirer

120. “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

121. “Despite all the terror and intimidation, the majority of them rejected Hitler. The Nazis led the polling with 17,277,180 votes – an increase of some five and a half million, but it comprised only 44 per cent of the total vote. A clear majority still eluded Hitler.”

— William L. Shirer

122. “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

123. “Germans did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of their culture had been destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work had become regimented to a degree never before.”

— William L. Shirer

124. “If you have sacrificed my nation to preserve the peace of the world,” he finally said, “I will be the first to applaud you. But if not, gentlemen, God help your souls!”

— William L. Shirer

125. “Thus in Prussia the Hohenzollern King was the head of the Church. In no country with the exception of Czarist Russia did the clergy become by tradition so completely servile to the political authority of the State.”

— William L. Shirer

126. “The secret police announced that two men were shot for “resisting arrest” yesterday. One of them, it is stated, was trying to induce some German workers to lay down their tools in an important armament factory. Himmler now has power to shoot anyone he likes without trial.”

— William L. Shirer

127. “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

128. “To his dying day, it is obvious, Hitler never forgave his teachers for the poor marks they had given him – nor could he forget. But he could distort to a point of grotesqueness.”

— William L. Shirer

129. “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

130. “On Sunday, January 29, a hundred thousand workers crowded into the Lustgarten in the center of Berlin to demonstrate their opposition to making Hitler Chancellor.”

— William L. Shirer

131. “I want now to fulfill the vow which I made to myself five years ago when I was a blind cripple in the military hospital: to know neither rest nor peace until the November criminals had been overthrown, until on the ruins of the wretched Germany of today there should have arisen once more a Germany of power and greatness, of freedom and splendor.”

— William L. Shirer

132. “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

133. “At the beginning of 1923 the Voelkischer Beobachter became a daily, thus giving Hitler the prerequisite of all German political parties, a daily newspaper in which to preach the party’s gospels.”

— William L. Shirer

134. “They might not like the party’s demagoguery and its vulgarity, but on the other hand it was arousing the old feelings of German patriotism and nationalism which had been so muted during the first ten years of the Republic. It promised to lead the German people away from communism, socialism, trade-unionism and the futilities of democracy. Above all, it had caught fire throughout the Reich. It was a success.”

— William L. Shirer

135. “Though Eva Braun had a birdlike mind and made no intellectual impression on Hitler at all – perhaps this is one reason he preferred her company to that of intelligent women – it is obvious that his influence on her, as on so many others, was total.”

— William L. Shirer

136. “The Hereditary Farm Law of September 29, 1933, was a remarkable mixture of pushing back the peasants to medieval days and of protecting them against the abuses of the modern monetary age.”

— William L. Shirer

137. “With such incomparable sources so soon available and with the memory of life in Nazi Germany and of the appearance and behavior and nature of the men who ruled it, Adolf Hitler above all, still fresh in my mind and bones, I decided, at any rate, to make an attempt to set down the history of the rise and fall of the Third Reich.”

— William L. Shirer

138. “For what must have been a period of several hours, broken only by a late lunch, the demonic dictator rambled on, and there is no evidence from the records that a single general, admiral or Air Force commander dared to interrupt him to question his judgment or even to challenge his lies.”

— William L. Shirer

139. “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

140. “The First Reich had been the medieval Holy Roman Empire; the Second Reich had been that which was formed by Bismarck in 1871 after Prussia’s defeat of France. Both had added glory to the German name. The Weimar Republic, as Nazi propaganda had it, had dragged that fair name in the mud. The Third Reich restored it, just as Hitler had promised. Hitler’s Germany, then, was depicted as a logical development from all that had gone before – or at least of all that had been glorious.”

— William L. Shirer

141. “The university students in Germany, as we have seen, had been among the most fanatical of Nazis in the early Thirties. But ten years of Hitler’s rule had brought disillusionment, and this was sharpened by the failure of Germany to win the war and particularly, as 1943 came, by the disaster at Stalingrad.”

— William L. Shirer

142. “As the strife-ridden year of 1932 approached its end, Berlin was full of cabals, and of cabals within cabals.”

— William L. Shirer

143. “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.”

— William L. Shirer

144. “The Germans, if one may risk a generalization, have a weakness for blaming foreigners for their failures.”

— William L. Shirer

145. “The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it.”

— William L. Shirer

146. “The suffering of his fellow Germans was not something to waste time sympathizing with, but rather to transform, cold-bloodedly and immediately, into political support for his own ambitions.”

— William L. Shirer

147. “PARIS, August 3 Hitler did what no one expected. He made himself both President and Chancellor. Any doubts about the loyalty of the army were done away with before the old field-marshal’s body was hardly cold. Hitler had the army swear an oath of unconditional obedience to him personally. The man is resourceful.”

— William L. Shirer

148. “Yet I think no one who lived in the Third Reich could have failed to be impressed by Nietzsche’s influence on it. His books might be full, as Santayana said, of “genial imbecility” and “boyish blasphemies.” Yet Nazi scribblers never tired of extolling him.”

— William L. Shirer

149. “Still, the talk went on, especially in the nation’s capital, though by the end of 1946, I noted, it was beginning to shift toward fear of Russian spies. Wild charges were beginning to be made that some of our most eminent statesmen were agents of Moscow and participants in a Communist conspiracy. Certain politicians were drumming up fear that our Communists, who couldn’t elect a dogcatcher in any state of the Union, were about to take over the Republic.”

— William L. Shirer

150. “He could bear even less the disaster which befell his beloved Fatherland in November 1918. To him, as to almost all Germans, it was “monstrous” and undeserved. The German Army had not been defeated in the field. It had been stabbed in the back by the traitors at home.”

— William L. Shirer