Top 200 William L. Shirer Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “The lower middle classes, all the millions of shopkeepers and small-salaried folk on whom Hitler had to draw for his mass support, shared in the general prosperity.”

— William L. Shirer

152. “And then: “My own fate became known to me. I decided to go into politics.”6 As it turned out, this was a fateful decision for Hitler and for the world.”

— William L. Shirer

153. “His fists raised, his cheeks flushed with rage, his whole body trembling, the man stood there in front of me, beside himself with fury and having lost all self-control. After each outburst Hitler would stride up and down the carpet edge, then suddenly stop immediately before me and hurl his next accusation in my face. He was almost screaming, his eyes seemed to pop out of his head and the veins stood out in his temples.”

— William L. Shirer

154. “Most of the heckling at Hitler had really been directed against parts of the program which he read out, but he nevertheless considered all the points as having been adopted and they became the official program of the Nazi Party when its name was altered on April 1, 1920, to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.”

— William L. Shirer

155. “In addition, the decree authorized the Reich government to take over complete power in the federal states when necessary and imposed the death sentence for a number of crimes, including “serious disturbances of the peace” by armed persons.”

— William L. Shirer

156. “Nazism appeared to be a dying cause. It had mushroomed on the country’s misfortunes; now that the nation’s outlook was suddenly bright it was rapidly withering away. Or so most Germans and foreign observers believed.”

— William L. Shirer

157. “It was in the plunder not of material goods but of human lives that the mercifully short-lived New Order will be longest remembered. Here Nazi degradation sank to a level seldom experienced by man in all his time on earth.”

— William L. Shirer

158. “Have we not reached a stage in history where no small nation is safe any longer, where they all must live on sufferance from the dictators? Gone are those pleasant nineteenth-century days when a country could remain neutral and at peace just by saying it wanted to.”

— William L. Shirer

159. “But Hitler was not entirely wrong in saying that to understand Nazism one must first know Wagner.”

— William L. Shirer

160. “What interested Hitler was political power; economics could somehow take care of itself.”

— William L. Shirer

161. “But the greatest cause of his acceptance of his role in Nazi Germany was, without any doubt at all, that he had a job again and the assurance that he would keep it.”

— William L. Shirer

162. “Thus Spake Zarathustra.”

— William L. Shirer

163. “I thought of a bad pun: “I’m going from bad to Hearst.”

— William L. Shirer

164. “And cannot it be added that it was one of the world’s misfortunes that so many in the interwar years either ignored or laughed off the Nazi aims which Hitler had taken the pains to put down in writing? Surely the anti-Semitic points of the program promulgated in the Munich beer hall on the evening of February 24, 1920, constituted a dire warning.”

— William L. Shirer

165. “He made it clear enough that there would be no “democratic nonsense” and that the Third Reich would be ruled by the Fuehrerprinzip, the leadership principle – that is, that it would be a dictatorship.”

— William L. Shirer

166. “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

167. “PARIS, February 15 The fighting in Vienna ended today, the dispatches say. Dollfuss finished off the last workers with artillery and then went off to pray. Well, at least the Austrian Social Democrats fought, which is more than their comrades in Germany did. Apparently Otto Bauer and Julius Deutsch got safely over the Czech frontier. A good thing, or Dollfuss would have hanged them.”

— William L. Shirer

168. “We German Social Democrats pledge ourselves solemnly in this historic hour to the principles of humanity and justice, of freedom and socialism. No enabling act can give you the power to destroy ideas which are eternal and indestructible.”

— William L. Shirer

169. “The important ministries went to the conservatives, who were sure they had lassoed the Nazis for their own ends: Neurath.”

— William L. Shirer

170. “It has done much damage that many reluctant Germans in high places spoke and wrote to Englishmen after the solution of the Czech question. The Fuehrer carried his point when you lost your nerve and capitulated too soon.”

— William L. Shirer

171. “The administrators of the law became one of the centers of the counterrevolution, perverting justice for reactionary political ends. “It is impossible to escape the conclusion,” the historian Franz L. Neumann declared, “that political justice is the blackest page in the life of the German Republic.”

— William L. Shirer

172. “Such were the men whom Hitler gathered around him in the early years for his drive to become dictator of a nation which had given the world a Luther, a Kant, a Goethe and a Schiller, a Bach, a Beethoven and a Brahms.”

— William L. Shirer

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

— William L. Shirer

174. “Adolf’s mother was his father’s second cousin, and an episcopal dispensation had to be obtained for the marriage.”

— William L. Shirer

175. “When Germany defaulted in deliveries of timber, the hardheaded French Premier, who had been the wartime President of France, ordered French troops to occupy the Ruhr. The industrial heart of Germany, which, after the loss of Upper Silesia to Poland, furnished the Reich with four fifths of its coal and steel production, was cut off from the rest of the country.”

— William L. Shirer

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “The National Reich Church of Germany categorically claims the exclusive right and the exclusive power to control all churches within the borders of the Reich: it declares these to be national churches of the German Reich.”

— William L. Shirer

182. “Reparations were to be fixed later, but a first payment of five billion dollars in gold marks was to be paid between 1919 and 1921, and certain deliveries in kind – coal, ships, lumber, cattle, etc. – were to be made in lieu of cash reparations.”

— William L. Shirer

183. “For six years, since the Nazi “co-ordination” of the daily newspapers, which had meant the destruction of a free press, the citizens had been cut off from the truth of what was going on in the world.”

— William L. Shirer

184. “Among the zealous members of the Gobineau Society in Germany was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose life and works constitute one of the most fascinating ironies in the inexorable course of history which led to the rise and fall of the Third Reich.”

— William L. Shirer

185. “Without Lenin and Hitler the Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions most probably would not have succeeded. Without Gandhi there would have been no serious threat to British rule as the 1930′s began. In India I began to see that Gandhi, as Friedrich Meinecke would say of Hitler, was already one of the examples of the singular and incalculable power of personality in historical life. In India it was the only such personality there was.”

— William L. Shirer

186. “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

187. “It is only as an Austrian who came of age in the last decade before the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire, who failed to take root in its civilized capital, who embraced all the preposterous prejudices and hates then rife among its German-speaking extremists and who failed to grasp what was decent and honest and honorable in the vast majority of his fellow citizens, were they Czechs or Jews or Germans, poor or well off, artists or artisans, that Hitler can be understood.”

— William L. Shirer

188. “These three things seem so logical, almost so simple to us now. But history will record – even if we forget – the great fight the President had to make to achieve them. It will record how our growing army was saved from dissolution by one single vote in Congress. It will note by what a narrow margin Lend-Lease, which kept Britain and Russia in the fight until they could regain their strength to hit back, passed the Congress.”

— William L. Shirer

189. “That I was poor and without means seemed to me the most bearable part of it, but it was harder that I was numbered among the nameless, that I was one of the millions whom chance permits to live or summons out of existence without even their closest neighbors condescending to take any notice of it. In addition, there was the difficulty which inevitably arose from my lack of schooling.”

— William L. Shirer

190. “It had to allow Strasser, Goebbels and the crank Feder to beguile the masses with the cry that the National Socialists were truly “socialists” and against the money barons. On the other hand, money to keep the party going had to be wheedled out of those who had an ample supply of it.”

— William L. Shirer

191. “Everyone could see the contrast between this thriving, martial, boldly led new Germany and the decadent democracies in the West, whose confusions and vacillations seemed to increase with each new month of the calendar.”

— William L. Shirer

192. “The basis for a successful political revolution on which he had always insisted – the support of existing institutions such as the Army, the police, the political group in power – was now crumbling.”

— William L. Shirer

193. “And now, as the fateful summer of 1944 approached, they realized that with the Red armies nearing the frontier of the Reich, the British and American armies poised for a large-scale invasion across the Channel, and the German resistance to Alexander’s Allied forces in Italy crumbling, they must quickly get rid of Hitler and the Nazi regime if any kind of peace at all was to be had that would spare Germany from being overrun and annihilated.”

— William L. Shirer

194. “In private conversation he disclosed himself as a forceful and logical speaker, which, when tempered with a fanatical earnestness, made a very deep impression on a neutral listener.”

— William L. Shirer

195. “The great issues of peace and war will never be decided by majority vote, or any vote. We Americans have got to get that through our heads. That, and the fact that Russia, Great Britain and the United States, after due discussion, will largely determine the kind of world organization we are going to have.”

— William L. Shirer

196. “The plotters finally had someone to give orders – without such, a German officer seemed lost, even a rebellious one, even on this crucial day – and they began to act.”

— William L. Shirer

197. “People are talking about the action of the British yesterday in sinking three French battleships in Oran to save them from falling into the hands of the Germans. The French, who have sunk to a depth below your imagination, say they will break relations with Britain. They say they trusted Hitler’s word not to use the French fleet against Britain. Pitiful. And yet there will be great bitterness throughout France. The Entente Cordiale is dead. We.”

— William L. Shirer

198. “On the contrary, they supported it with genuine enthusiasm. Somehow it imbued them with a new hope and a new confidence and an astonishing faith in the future of their country.”

— William L. Shirer

199. “Three youths in Hanover who snatched a lady’s handbag in the black-out have been sentenced to death.”

— William L. Shirer

200. “Chamberlain’s obsequiousness, his exaggerated flattery, in these letters can be nauseating. “Your Majesty and your subjects,” he wrote, “have been born in a holy shrine,” and he informed Wilhelm that he had placed his portrait in his study opposite one of Christ by Leonardo so that while he worked he often paced up and down between the countenance of his Savior and his sovereign.”

— William L. Shirer