Best 552 quotes in «socialism quotes» category

Why?' Said Harry. 'For the big idea, Oliver. Someone comes up with the big idea - could be religion, could be politics, could be the race you belong to, or your clan, or philosophy, or economics, or your sex or just how many bleeding guineas you got stashed in the counting house. Doesn't matter, because the big idea is always the same - wouldn't it be good if only EVERYONE was the same as ME -if only everyone else thought and acted and worshipped and looked like me, everything would become a paradise on earth. 'But people are too different, too diverse to fit into one way of acting or thinking or looking. And that's where the trouble starts. That's when they show up at your door to make the ones who don't fit vanish, when, frustrated by the lack of progress and your stupidity and plain wrongness at not appreciating the perfection of the big idea, they start trying to to shave off the imperfections. Using knives and racks and axe-men and camps and Gideon's Collars. When you see a difference in a person and can find only wickedness in it - you and them - the THEM become fair game, not people anymore but obstacles to the greater good, and it's always open season on THEM.

Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations in the long term.

Without anarchy, there would be chaos.

You can either have individual liberty, or dependence on the government. One is designed to undo the other.

You either limit the government, or you limit the scope of your life. Why is the government that precious to you in the first place?

You Need To Gauge, To Engage.

All socialism involves slavery. That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labours under coercion to satisfy anothers desires.

Apart from my absolute belief in National Socialism and my conviction of Hitler's superhuman heroism, I had always been attracted to Germany.

A socialist is somebody who doesn't have anything, and is ready to divide it up equally among everybody.

You are cordially invited to go fuck yourself.

You might think that the Left could have a regime-change perspective of its own, based on solidarity with its comrades abroad. After all, Saddam's ruling Ba'ath Party consolidated its power by first destroying the Iraqi communist and labor movements, and then turning on the Kurds (whose cause, historically, has been one of the main priorities of the Left in the Middle East). When I first became a socialist, the imperative of international solidarity was the essential if not the defining thing, whether the cause was popular or risky or not. I haven't seen an anti-war meeting all this year at which you could even guess at the existence of the Iraqi and Kurdish opposition to Saddam, an opposition that was fighting for 'regime change' when both Republicans and Democrats were fawning over Baghdad as a profitable client and geopolitical ally. Not only does the 'peace' movement ignore the anti-Saddam civilian opposition, it sends missions to console the Ba'athists in their isolation, and speaks of the invader of Kuwait and Iran and the butcher of Kurdistan as if he were the victim and George W. Bush the aggressor.

Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates... Instead, they must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service, should learn to think and act as a mass.

You will never find peace with these fascists You'll never find friends such as we So remember that valley of Jarama And the people that'll set that valley free. From this valley they say we are going Do not hasten to bid us adieu Even though we lost the battle at Jarama We'll set this valley before we're through. All this world is like this valley called Jarama So green and so bright and so fair No fascists can dwell in our valley Nor breathe in our new freedoms air.

A traffic jam is a collision between free enterprise and socialism. Free enterprise produces automobiles faster than socialism can build roads and road capacity.

Bernie Sanders has shown that socialism is no longer the barrier that it used to be during the Cold War.

By now even the word socialism has so many meanings and interpretations. The Russians call themselves socialists, the Swedes call themselves. And let's not forget that in Germany there was also a national socialism.

Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated.

A Western writer came up to me and said, how come nobody at this demonstration spoke of German unity? I told him, because it isn't on the agenda. People were interested in having another, better GDR, another, better socialism.

Democracy and socialism are means to an end, not the end itself.

Commercial shackles are generally unjust, oppressive, and impolitic.

Even in West Germany in the beginning, people wanted a kind of socialism.

Even under the most perfect Social Democracy we should, without Communism, still be living like hogs, except that each hog would get his fair share of grub.... Whilst we are hogs, let us at least be well-fed, healthy, reciprocally useful hogs, instead of--well, instead of the sort we are at present.

Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.

Europeans call it socialism, Americans call it welfare, and Barack Obama calls it change.

France could have all the socialism its capitalistic economy could support.

Even capitalists must surely admit, that intellectually at least, socialism is a worthy opponent. It imparts intelligence even to its adversaries.

Have not fascism in Italy and National Socialism in Germany claimed that they have attained similar results [as in U.S.S.R.]? Have not both been achieved at the price of privation and personal liberty sacrificed for the good of the state?

For us, Marxism is always open because there are always new experiences, there are always new facts, including facts about the past, which have to be incorporated in the corpus of scientific socialism.

Human society cannot basically stop the destruction of the environment under capitalism. Socialism is the only structure that makes it possible.

I am opposed to socialism because it dreams ingenuously of good, truth, beauty, and equal rights.

'Helping industry' is the elephant pit of socialism, a deep hole with sharp spikes at the bottom, covered over with twigs and fresh grass.

Ideology on which the Kyoto Protocol is based, is a new form of totalitarian ideology, along with Marxism, Communism and socialism.

If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one.

If the central contest of the twentieth century has pitted capitalism against socialism, then F. A. Hayek has been its central figure. He helped us to understand why capitalism won by a knockout. It was Hayek who elaborated the basic argument demonstrating that central planning was nothing else but an impoverishing fantasy.

If the Russians claim they are Socialist, this is just, I would say, a lie. They have no socialism at all. They have what I would call a state capitalism.

Imperialism, in a sense, is the transition stage from capitalism to Socialism. . . . It is capitalism dying, not dead.

in a socialist country you can get rich by providing necessities, while in a capitalist country you can get rich by providing luxuries.

In their day, Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin represented the aspirations and demands of the exploited working masses, and the cause of socialism was inseparably linked with their names.

If the electrician who comes to mend my fuse blows it instead, so I should stop having electricity? I should cut off my light? Socialism is my light, can you understand that?

I should tie myself to no particular system of society other than of socialism.

I think socialism is really about recognizing that there are limits to what the market can do. The market is very useful; at times it works very well, but it doesn't always work.

Interventionism cannot be considered as an economic system destined to stay. It is a method for the transformation of capitalism into socialism by a series of successive steps.

Like the phoenix, socialism is reborn from every pile of ashes left day in, day out, by burnt-out human dreams and charred hopes.

[It is b]etter to die on the losing side than to live under communisim.

It is not national interests we are upholding - we claim that the interests of socialism, the interests of world socialism, rank higher than national interests, higher than the interests of the state. We are defenders of the socialist fatherland.

Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species

Monotheism at Sinai, primitive Christianity, messianic socialism: these are the three supreme moments in which Western culture is presented with what Ibsen termed "the claims of the ideal." These are the three stages, profoundly interrelated, through which Western consciousness is forced to experience the blackmail of transcendence.

Obamacare is a private mandate that will drive billions to the insurance industry, much like the auto insurance mandate. Hardly socialism. In fact, it was a Republican plan to begin with.

No one should suffer from the great delusion that any form of communism or socialism which promotes the dictatorship of the few instead of the initiative of the millions can produce a happier or more prosperous society.

Now that the day of reckoning has arrived, they cry socialism!