Best 120 quotes in «collectivism quotes» category

Thomas More's Utopia was not a recommendation. It was a warning.

To accuse nations (not leaders or governments) is the hallmark of the demo-nationalist of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries; it leads to endless hatreds, feelings of revenge, misunderstandings, and frictions. It is the surest guarantee for perpetual mass wars.

We (libertarians) find just as many things to rip on the left as we do on the right. People on the far-left and the far-right are the same exact person to us.

Tyranny is the wolf cast by the shadows of sheep.

We know how the people of Argentina ruined their country. We know how the people of Venezuela ruined their country. Few Americans know much about the history of Argentina or Venezuela. But if they wish to know how the people of the USA are ruining their own country, all they have to do is look around themselves, including, in most cases, looking in the mirror.

Ultimately, all arguments against markets are arguments against anarchy. Marx understood this much, at least.

We humans have a dual nature—we are selfish primates who long to be a part of something larger and nobler than ourselves. We are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. If you take that claim metaphorically, then the groupish and hivish things that people do will make a lot more sense. It’s almost as though there’s a switch in our heads that activates our hivish potential when conditions are just right.

Why should people in one part of the globe have developed collectivist cultures, while others went individualist? The United States is the individualism poster child for at least two reasons. First there's immigration. Currently, 12 percent of Americans are immigrants, another 12 percent are children of immigrants, and everyone else except for the 0.9 percent pure Native Americans descend from people who emigrated within the last five hundred years. And who were the immigrants? Those in the settled world who were cranks, malcontents, restless, heretical, black sheep, hyperactive, hypomanic, misanthropic, itchy, unconventional, yearning to be rich, yearning to be out of their damn boring repressive little hamlet, yearning. Couple that with the second reason - for the majority of its colonial and independent history, America has had a moving frontier luring those whose extreme prickly optimism made merely booking passage to the New World insufficiently novel - and you've got America the individualistic. Why has East Asia provided textbook examples of collectivism? The key is how culture is shaped by the way people traditionally made a living, which in turn is shaped by ecology. And in East Asia it's all about rice. Rice, which was domesticated there roughly ten thousand years ago, requires massive amounts of communal work. Not just backbreaking planting and harvesting, which are done in rotation because the entire village is needed to harvest each family's rice. The United States was not without labor-intensive agriculture historically. But rather than solving that with collectivism, it solved it withe slavery.

What ranks above all else for economic and political reconstruction is a radical change of ideologies. Economic prosperity is not so much a material problem; it is, first of all, an intellectual, spiritual, and moral problem.

Which is worse? Lust for the purchasing power of money, or the kind of lust that covets power over others? Let the history of 20th Century socialist revolutions answer that question.

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.

When you consider socialism, do not fool yourself about its nature. Remember that there is no such dichotomy as “human rights” versus “property rights.” No human rights can exist without property rights.

Without anarchy, there would be chaos.

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.

A man's admiration of absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.

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?

Collectivism and freedom are mortal enemies. Only one will survive

The market is not an invention of capitalism. It has existed for centuries. It is an invention of civilization.

The argument for collectivism is simple; free market is not.

The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.

A hand gets way cleaner from washing, not itself, but the other hand.

We are now moving towards complete collectivism or socialism, a system under which everybody is enslaved to everybody.

A libertarian is somebody who believes, of course, in personal liberty. And liberty is a personal thing; it is not collective. You don’t gain liberty because you belong to a group. So we don’t talk about women’s rights or gay rights or anything else. Everybody has an absolute equal right as an individual, and it comes to them naturally.

All Socialism is Democratic Socialism. Socialist nations take away civil liberties by referendum.

As long as government has the power to regulate business, business will control government by funding the candidate that legislates in their favor. A free-market thwarts lobbying by taking the power that corporations seek away from government! The only sure way to prevent the rich from buying unfair government influence is to stop allowing government to use physical force against peaceful people. Whenever government is allowed to favor one group over another, the rich will always win, since they can "buy" more favors, overtly or covertly, than the poor.

A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.

Anarcho-capitalism is not by definition libertarian. It is rather a prediction, not a definition.

Collectives can’t make money from virtues they make money from weakness. Where there are no weak, they create weak. Cowards hate strong people.

Big Government' is a lot less like a 'Big Brother', and a lot more like a mother-in-law.

Capitalism believes in collectivism for itself and individualism for its enemies.

Centrally planned economies are upended by out of control population. Their escape valve is eugenics.

Commerce tends toward rewarding inclusion, broadness, and liberality. Tribal loyalties, ethnic and religious bigotries, and irrational prejudices are bad for business. The merchant class has been conventionally distrusted by tribalist leaders -- from the ancient to the modern world -- precisely because merchantcraft tends to break down barriers between groups.

Collectivist ethical principle: man is not an end to himself, but is only a tool to serve the ends of others. Whether those ‘others’ are a dictator’s gang, the nation, society, the race, (the) god(s), the majority, the community, the tribe, etc., is irrelevant – the point is that man in principle must be sacrificed to others.

Collectivists see the world the way Mr. Magoo did—as one big blur. They homogenize people in a communal blender, sacrificing the discrete features that make us who we are.

Communism is what happens when Socialists realize that they want complete control over every aspect of human life.

Collectivism is the "philosophy" of every cockroach and sewer rat: "If I want it, I must need it, and if I need it, I have a right to it, and if I have a right to it, it doesn't matter what I have to do to get it." The fact that such an inherently animalistic, short-sighted, anti-human viewpoint is now painted by some as compassionate and "progressive" does not make it any more sane, or any less dangerous.

Deprived of the infinite, man has become what he always was: a supernumerary. He hardly counts; he forms part of the troupe called Humanity; if he misses a cue, he is hissed; and if he drops through the trapdoor another puppet is in readiness to take his place.

Dear Anarcho-Communist, If you and I ever find ourselves in a stateless society, have no fear. Just mention that you are a communist, and I promise I will never try to "oppress" and "exploit" you by offering to trade with you, or by offering to pay you to do work. Sincerely, Larken Rose

Eugenics has always been the escape valve of single payer socialized medicine. Havelock Ellis was writing about them as one and the same prior to the fin-de-siecle. Culling out of control population growth and the economic drain of the incurably sick has always been a part of socialized medicine.

Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have eroded.

Every totalitarian Communist considered themselves as a Socialist first and foremost.

Even the richest person, provided the riches comes from mutually beneficial exchange, does not need to give anything "back" to the community, because this person took nothing out of the community. Indeed, the reverse is true: Enterprises give to the community. Their owners take huge risks, and front the money for investment, precisely with the goal of serving others. Their riches are signs that they have achieved their aims.

Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator. A mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement. He wants them to surrender their consciousness to his assertions, his edicts, his wishes, his whims—as his consciousness is surrendered to theirs. He wants to deal with men by means of faith and force—he finds no satisfaction in their consent if he must earn it by means of facts and reason. Reason is the enemy he dreads and, simultaneously, considers precarious; reason, to him, is a means of deception; he feels that men possess some power more potent than reason—and only their causeless belief or their forced obedience can give him a sense of security, a proof that he has gained control of the mystic endowment he lacked. His lust is to command, not to convince: conviction requires an act of independence and rests on the absolute of an objective reality. What he seeks is power over reality and over men’s means of perceiving it, their mind, the power to interpose his will between existence and consciousness, as if, by agreeing to fake the reality he orders them to fake, men would, in fact, create it.

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

For 70 years Democrats bitterly denied being "socialists". Bernie Sanders has done the service of exposing them.

For Americans, the car is the American way. Jay Gatsby roars through capitalism, individual freedom, and the good life. For China, the train is the metaphor. Everyone's on board, there's no chance to steer, and it's clickety-clack to collectivism's dreams.

Forever seeking Archimedean levers for prying the world in directions they prefer, progressives say they embrace high-speed rail for many reasons—to improve the climate, increase competitiveness, enhance national security, reduce congestion, and rationalize land use. The length of the list of reasons, and the flimsiness of each, points to this conclusion: the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.

For anyone who thinks "profit" is evil, I have a challenge for you: try NOT to get any profit in the next week. Profit simply means increasing how much valuable stuff you have, and if you don't profit, you die. Literally. For example, don't buy any food for a week, because when you buy food (or anything), it's because you value the food MORE than you value the money you trade for it. If you didn't, you wouldn't make the trade. So you PROFIT (and so does the seller) every time you buy something. And every time you sell something, or work for money, etc. So before condemning "profit" (or "greed" or "selfishness," for that matter), see if you can survive without it. Then stop repeating vague collectivist BS, and learn to distinguish between "win/win" events (voluntary exchange) where BOTH sides profit, and "win/lose" events, where one side benefits by harming the other side. By the way, "government" is ALWAYS the latter.

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.

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.