"To destroy images is something every revolution has been able to do"
About this Quote
The intent is less a diagnosis than a permission slip. Rosenberg, the Nazi regime’s chief ideologue on “culture” and race, helped script a politics that treated art and imagery as contaminants: modernism as “degeneracy,” Jewish presence as a visual and moral infection, pluralism as aesthetic chaos. In that context, “images” aren’t just statues and paintings; they’re representations of people, histories, and ideas that compete with the movement’s myth. Destroying them isn’t collateral damage. It’s the point.
The subtext is a tell: revolutions may promise new worlds, but they first police what can be seen. Iconoclasm works because it is instantly legible; it produces spectacle, fear, and a clean before-and-after photo for propaganda. Break the monuments, burn the books, purge the museums, and you shrink the imagination of what’s possible. Rosenberg’s cynicism lies in the quiet boast that creation is hard, persuasion is slow, governing is messy; erasure is fast. The sentence is a blueprint for authoritarian aesthetics: rule by narrowing the picture.
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APA Style (7th ed.)
Rosenberg, Alfred. (2026, January 17). To destroy images is something every revolution has been able to do. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/to-destroy-images-is-something-every-revolution-60763/
Chicago Style
Rosenberg, Alfred. "To destroy images is something every revolution has been able to do." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/to-destroy-images-is-something-every-revolution-60763/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"To destroy images is something every revolution has been able to do." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/to-destroy-images-is-something-every-revolution-60763/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.







