Joseph Goebbels ran the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda from 1933 until his death in 1945, and is the name Western readers reach for whenever a sentence about manipulating a public needs an author. That reflex is why so many unsourced aphorisms end up under his name: attach it to Goebbels and it reads as self-evidently true, and almost nobody checks. He is in fact a well-documented writer — speeches published by the party press, articles collected in book form, diaries running to many volumes — which makes his real output easy to search and the absence of a given line meaningful rather than merely unproven.