Best 647 quotes in «communism quotes» category

Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property

Fiat ars – pereat mundus”, says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.

Finally liberty has come!

Florence imagined the Hammer and Sickle metallurgical plant to be an enormous brick factory like the ones in New York. But as she approached she saw it was in fact a small city of its own

Florence, listen to me carefully. He squeezed her hand. Take whatever that agent offers you. Give him what he wants, and don’t ask too many questions. Get yourself an exit visa as soon as you can. Then leave! Disappear. Forget this wretched place

Florence could feel a constriction in her chest…She had been foolish enough to hope that whatever she was walking into would affect no one but herself. Now the truth was catching up with her at the speed of her galloping heartbeat…Now they had summoned her. And they knew everything

Florence, listen to me carefully.... Take whatever that agent offers you. Give him what he wants, and don’t ask too many questions. Get yourself an exit visa as soon as you can. Then leave! Disappear. Forget this wretched place

For good people to do evil doesn't require only religion, or even any religion, but simply one of it's key elements: belief without evidence-in other words, faith. And that kind of faith is seen not just in religion, but any authoritarian ideology that puts dogma above truth and frowns on dissent. This was precisely the case in the totalitarian regimes of Maoist China and Stalinist Russia, whose excesses are often (and wrongly) blamed on atheism.

For good people to do evil doesn't require only religion, or even any religion, but simply one of it's key elements: belief without evidence-in other words, faith. And that kind of faith is seen not just in religion, but any authoritarian ideology that puts dogma above truth and frowns on dissent. This was precisely the case in the totalitarian regimes of Maoist China and Stalinist Russia, whose excesses are often (and wrongly) blamed on atheism. Faith vs. Fact. p. 220

For now, we live in the mall, but I think it's closing soon.

For so many years, the official propaganda machinery had denounced humanitarianism as sentimental trash and advocated human relations based entirely on class allegiance. But my personal experience had shown me that most of the Chinese people remained kind, sensitive, and compassionate even though the cruel reality of the system under which they had to live compelled them to lie and pretend. Pg. 409

[Free trade agreements] are trade agreements that don't stick to trade…they colonize environmental labor, and consumer issues of grave concern (in terms of health safety, and livelihoods too) to many, many hundreds of millions of people - and they do that by subordinating consumer, environmental, and labor issues to the imperatives and the supremacy of international commerce. That is exactly the reverse of how democratic societies have progressed, because over the decades they've progressed by subordinating the profiteering priorities of companies to, say, higher environmental health standards; abolition of child labor; the right of workers to have fair worker standards…and it's this subordination of these three major categories that affect people's lives, labor, environment, the consumer, to the supremacy and domination of trade; where instead of trade getting on its knees and showing that it doesn't harm consumers - it doesn't deprive the important pharmaceuticals because of drug company monopolies, it doesn't damage the air and water and soil and food (environmentally), and it doesn't lacerate the rights of workers - no, it's just the opposite: it's workers and consumers and environments that have to kneel before this giant pedestal of commercial trade and prove that they are not, in a whole variety of ways, impeding international commerce…so this is the road to dictatorial devolution of democratic societies: because these trade agreements have the force of law, they've got enforcement teeth, and they bypass national courts, national regulatory agencies, in ways that really reflect a massive, silent, mega-corporate coup d'etat…that was pulled off in the mid-1990's.

General Gary Prado Salmón, retired, had been the commander of the unit that had captured Guevara. He confirmed General Vargas’ statement and added that the guerrilla fighters had been burned, before dumping their bodies into a mass grave, dug by a bulldozer, at the end of the Vallegrande airstrip. He explained that the body of “Che” Guevara had been buried in a separate gravesite under the runway. The morning after the burials, “Che” Guevara’s younger brother, Juan Martin Guevara, arrived in Vallegrande, hoping to see his brother’s remains. Upon asking, he was told by the police that it was too late. Talking to some of the army officers, he was told lies or perhaps just differing accounts of the burial, confusing matters even more. The few peasants that were involved and knew what had happened were mysteriously unavailable. Having reached a dead end, he left for Buenos Aires not knowing much more than when he arrived.

From being a movement aiming for universal freedom, communism turned into a system of universal despotism. That is the logic of utopia.

Fuck socialism! No, really..... fuck socialism. Socialism sucks!

FUCK "UNITY"!! What a pathetic way of thinking. How arrogant of Progressives to think that my hopes and dreams mirror their hopes and dreams. What an absolute bore.... what an total lack of originality or individuality... I believe in individual liberty. I am an extremist on the topic of individual liberty, precisely because I value original thinking and original accomplishments. Fuck unity of purpose. Fuck collectivism. My life is not your life. I have my own path. Get out of my way.

Getting through life without a lot of money, possessions, and/or friends is admirable, especially if it is by choice.

From the moment Julian entered the world, Florence had begun to conceive of life as separate from the aspects of its outward circumstances. Over and over, life renewed itself. Over and over, it made itself blind to the death and destruction of the past

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Steal a fish from one guy and give it to another--and keep doing that on a daily basis--and you'll make the first guy pissed off, but you'll make the second guy lazy and dependent on you. Then you can tell the second guy that the first guy is greedy for wanting to keep the fish he caught. Then the second guy will cheer for you to steal more fish. Then you can prohibit anyone from fishing without getting permission from you. Then you can expand the racket, stealing fish from more people and buying the loyalty of others. Then you can get the recipients of the stolen fish to act as your hired thugs. Then you can ... well, you know the rest.

Government is a gang, but not merely as meritorious as a private gang because it claims legal legitimacy. It pillages and uses violence but under the cover of law, and seeks legitimacy not through competition but through the myth of the social contract.

Haven't you learned by now that he's as powerless as the rest of us? We're at the Party's mercy. If only we'd accepted that from the start.

Growing economies are built by billions of actors behaving according to their own interests, coordinated through institutions that no one in particular created. Realizing this requires humility, a trait that is in short supply among would-be dictators, politicians, and bureaucrats, which is precisely why these groups are the proven enemies of prosperity in all times and places.

Guérin's leftist, class-based critique of Jacobinism thus had three related implications for contemporary debates about political tactics and strategy. First, it implied a rejection of "class collaboration" and therefore of any type of alliance with the bourgeois Left (Popular Frontism). Second, it implied that the revolutionary movement should be uncompromising, that it should push for more radical social change and not stop halfway (which, as Saint Just famously remarked, was to dig one's own grave), rejecting the Stalinist emphasis on the unavoidability of separate historical "stages" in the long-term revolutionary process. Third, it implied a rejection both of the Leninist model of a centralised, hierarchical party dominating the labour movement and of the "substitutism" (substitution of the party for the proletariat) which had come to characterize the Bolshevik dictatorship.

Having lived in a mythical country, a place neither here nor there, these intellectuals from Vilna and Gomel helped create another and called it the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Such a name! It was hardly a union. The Soviets - workers’ councils - ruled it for about six weeks; socialism impoverished everybody, and only machine guns kept the republics from turning into nations. But to Szarza and the rest it didn’t matter. He’d put his life on the line, preferring simply to die at the wrong end of a gun rather than the wrong end of a club, and for twelve years - until 1929, when Stalin finally took over - he lived in a kind of dream world, a mythical country where idealistic, intellectual Jews actually ran things, quite literally a country of the mind. Theories failed, peasants died, the land itself dried up in despair. Still they worked twenty hours a day and swore they had the answer.

Having a Constitutional political party is a little like telling a car-jacker, "You're not allowed to do what you're doing! And if you don't stop it right now, we are going to ask you to order yourself to be nice! And if that doesn't work, we are going to try to elect a new car-jacker, who we hope will tell himself not to steal our cars! ... But at least we're not like those silly utopian anarchist kooks out there who refuse to work within the system for change! Those crazy people say there should be NO car-jackers at all!

He was afraid that the world struggle today was not of Communism against Fascism, but of tolerance against the bigotry that was preached equally by Communism and Fascism. But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word “Fascism” and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty. For they were thieves not only of wages but of honor. To their purpose they could quote not only Scripture but Jefferson.

He thought of his wife, of his son, of his youth. He thought of life. He thought of death and then he thought of life again.

Here I wake up because the pregnant woman is touching my face with her fingers. "Pane,"* she says to me, "you're calling out in your sleep and tossing about. I'll arrange a bed for you in another corner because you're pushing my father." She raises her thin legs and rounded abdomen and removes the blanket from the sleeping man. Lying on his back is an old man, dead. His glottis has been torn out and his face split in two; his beard is clotted with blue blood resembling a piece of lead. "Pane," says the Jewess, shaking the mattress, "the Poles killed him, and he begged them: 'Kill me in the back yard so that my daughter doesn't see how I die.' But they did as it was most convenient to them. He died in this room, thinking of me. And now I'd like to know," cried the woman with sudden terrible violence, "I'd like to know where you'd find in the whole world another father like my father!

He was explaining how capitalism is bad--and I could see he had a point, but at the same time, I got the feeling that socialism or communism, or whatever he's selling, is probably just as bad, and the problem is human beings can ruin anything, even if it's a good idea to begin with.

He went on like this all day, his lips bristling with bright iron brads under his grizzled beard, talking, spitting out nails, hammering them in, grasping, misquoting and singing all at the same time, lively as a leprechaun. "... the spectre of war is haunting Europe!"-bang bang bang-"You have nothing but your chains to lose, Mr. Small, and all the world to gain!" "Chains?" asked I. Small, looking about him. "What do you mean, chains? What chains? Where chains?" He touched his watch-chain to satisfy himself that it was not yet lost. Then, somewhat sadly, he said "You're bleddywell right. I got nothing but my chain to lose. And what's that worth? Three pounds?

He who thinks of renouncing "physical" struggle must renounce all struggle, for the spirit does not live without the flesh.

He who does not cry out the truth when he knows the truth becomes the accomplice of the liars and falsifiers.

History has been stolen from us and replaced with guilt inducing lies.

However, at 17 years old, I was ready to face any challenge and tackle any obstacles blocking the road to my dreams. I was ready to take on the world. I was unstoppable. Bygones were bygones. The future, however uncertain it might be, awaited me.

I believe profoundly that in the struggle against Communists and their organizations [...] we cannot and should not resort to the methods and forms employed by the Communists.

How would I explain to him that I couldn’t make peace with him? How would I explain that if I did I would immediately lose my inner balance? How would I explain that one of the arms of my internal scales would suddenly shoot upward? How would I explain that my hatred of him counterbalanced the weight of evil that had fallen on my youth? How would I explain that he embodied all the evils in my life? How would I explain to him that I needed to hate him?

I am aware always that the powers that be are so strong, we can not go headlong to pit our forces, it would be suicidal, so we had that position. Which Lenin himself said that 'it is not only foolish to launch an armed revolution but it is a leftist criminal adventurism when the people are not ready to support it.' The people are not ready, they don't even understand what we are talking about. . . . Yes, even socialism is not yet understood by people, much less communism. And the rich are very afraid of communism because it means confiscation of their wealth and liquidation of their lives.

I am political in spite of myself. I don't want to do the things I know I have to do, don't want to expose myself to disapproval, to retribution, don't want to go to meetings and demonstrations, distribute leaflets, don't want to ask people for signatures, for money. I don't do these things as naturally as I breathe, the way I imagine real political people do, real communists, real socialists and feminists, real radicals, real troublemakers, real champions of the people. I do them because I know I've got to, because I am convinced it's the only way to make changes, to stop abuses. I do them almost as a last resort. I do them because I've been putting off doing them, avoiding them for months, because finally the necessity has gripped me and overcome my reluctance, my desire for the warmth of my room, for my books, for my people, for the reassurance of my homely habits.

Idealistic? Ruddy stupid, if you'll pardon the language, miss,: Mr Roberts said. "All this talk about power for the people and down with the ruling classes and everyone should govern themselves. It can never happen, I told him. The ruling classes are born to rule. They know how to do it. You take a person like you or me and you put us up there to run a country and we'd make a ruddy mess of it.

I could never be a Communist. I could never be regimented. I could never be told what to write.

I couldn't make any sense of this logic, that the better off got more and those had little got less. The world ran on this law and only on this.

I dispute the right of conservatives to be automatically complacent on these points. My own Marxist group took a consistently anti-Moscow line throughout the 'Cold War,' and was firm in its belief that that Soviet Union and its European empire could not last. Very few people believed that this was the case: The best known anti-Communist to advance the proposition was the great Robert Conquest, but he himself insists that part of the credit for such prescience goes to Orwell. More recently, a very exact prefiguration of the collapse of the USSR was offered by two German Marxists, one of them from the West (Hans Magnus Enzensberger) and one from the East (Rudolf Bahro, the accuracy of whose prediction was almost uncanny). I have never met an American conservative who has even heard of, let alone read, either of these authors.

If anybody tries to penetrate the past with the knife of the present will always act in vain. The past is invulnerable. Such attempts can only cause the present or the future to bleed." - Gregor Brand

If capitalism was under another system which regulated it, so that supplies would fit the demand, rather than the suppliers trying to manipulate demands with deception to sell, then capitalism would be a great system.

If Stalin gives you a love advice, it has to succeed.

If collectivizing highly personal medical decisions is evil, then so follows that collectivized medicine is evil.

If the immediate postwar period had been characterized by violent attacks on the existing institutions of civil society, after 1948 the regimes [of Eastern Europe] began instead to create a new system of state-controlled schools and mass organizations which would envelop their citizens from the moment of birth. Once inside this totalitarian system, it was assumed, the citizens of of the communist states would never want or be able to leave it. They were meant to become, in the sarcastic phrasing of an old Soviet dissident, members of the species Homo sovieticus, Soviet man. Not only would Homo Sovieticus never oppose communism; he could never even conceive of opposing communism.

If conquest constitutes a natural right on the part of the few, the many have only to gather sufficient strength in order to acquire the natural right of reconquering what has been taken from them

If there are no isolated phenomena in the world, if all phenomena are interconnected and interdependent, then it is clear that every social system and every social movement in history must be evaluated not from the standpoint of "eternal justice" or some other preconceived idea, as is not infrequently done by historians, but from the standpoint of the conditions which gave rise to that system or that social movement and with which they are connected.

I hate vodka. It is the second worst thing to have come out of Russia, after communism - which isn't Russian anyway, Karl Marx was Russian.