Quotes About Socialism

True socialism is based not on equality of income or character, but on the equality of manners.

I suppose not everyone has a dad who wrote a book saying he didn't believe in the Parliamentary road to socialism.

A Socialist State demands precisely the same human symbols as that of Fascist or Nazi, and the same surrender of human liberties if it is to succeed.

The method of this great philosopher [Kant] can serve as a pointer to the satisfying solution to our problem. Of course we don't have to slavishly adhere to Kant's form, but we must match his method to the nature of our own subject [socialism], displaying the same critical spirit. Our critique must be direct against both a scepticism that undermines all theoretical thought, and a dogmatism that relies on ready-made formulas

Old Conservatism, at least in its more principled forms, is, as has been aptly said, the 'other God that failed' alongside Communism and radical socialism.4

Ironic, isn't it! A group of socialists who had espoused the values of New Labour and who were loudly beating the drum for equality of opportunity and education were ready to pile onto a working-class kid who'd never had one-tenth of the privilege of their own son.

The functional defect of socialism is that it is not social. It has not helped the poor man by eradicating the prince; it has only made the prince poor. If it has not put a chicken in every pot, it has removed the peacock from every lawn. It has made liberality a casualty of an artifact called liberalism. Such may satisfy the motive of envy; it is irrelevant to the motive of charity, and in the collectivist bosom it engenders the very greed it scorned.

Socialism produces bad music, bad art, social stagnation and really unhappy people.

Socialism states that you owe me something simply because I exist. Capitalism, by contrast, results in a sort of reality-forced altruism: I may not want to help you, I may dislike you, but if I don't give you a product or service you want, I will starve. Voluntary exchange is more moral than forced redistribution.

What we are not willing to negotiate and what we will not give in one iota is the revolution, socialism and our sovereignty.

In socialism, everything is supposed to be equal. And yet, it's always fascinating how the elite government bureaucrats (in socialist places like Venezuela, Cuba and Argentina) are the ones that wind up with all the money.

Almost the only persons who may be said to comprehend even approximately the significance, principles, and purposes of Socialism are the chief leaders of the extreme wings of the Socialistic forces, and perhaps a few of the money kings themselves.

You've got Washington picking winners and losers. And so, all of a sudden, decisions are being made on what helps politicians, not what helps the economy. Some will call it socialism. Some will call it a command and control economy. Whatever it is, it's antithetical to the American experience.

When I talked to my medical friends about the strange silence on this subject in American medical magazines and textbooks, I gained the impression that here was a subject tainted with Socialism or with feminine sentimentality for the poor.

You wonder, how could socialists, true socialists work with Islamists? Because if those Islamists take over, the first thing they're going to do is kill the socialists.

I have collected the history of 'domestic,' 'indoor' socialism, bit by bit. The history of how it played out in the human soul. I am drawn to that small space called a human being... a single individual. In reality, that is where everything happens.

Once one of the most important steel manufacturing centers in the world, Braddock - what's left of it - solemnly affirms one of the great economic maxims of our society: socialism for the rich, and capitalism for the poor.

Kundera says that what makes a leftist (of any kind—socialists, communists, Trotskyites, left-liberals, and so on) a leftist is a shared belief that humanity is on a "Grand March" toward Progress: "The Grand March is the splendid march on the road to brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness; it goes on and on, obstacles notwithstanding, for obstacles there must be if the march is to be the Grand March.

The contradictory nature of the socialist utopias is one explanation of the violence involved in the attempt to impose them: it takes infinite force to make people do what is impossible".

It must be remembered that a vast majority of mankind's history has been spent living under the rule of tyrants and authoritarians. The ideas of Liberty are very new when you consider the big picture. By contrast, various forms of socialism and fascism have been adopted over and over again. Be wary of those who try to present these old and tired ideas as something new and exciting. Liberty and free markets are the way forward if we truly desire peace and prosperity.

History is the only true teacher, the revolution the best school for the proletariat.

Socialism does not mean getting together in a parliament and passing laws, socialism means for us overthrowing the ruling classes with all the brutality [loud laughter] that the proletariat is capable of deploying in its struggle.

There was no doubt for Marx and Engels about the necessity of having the proletariat conquer political power. It is left to Bernstein to consider the poultry-yard of bourgeois Parliamentarism as the organ by which we are to realize the most formidable social transformation of history, the passage from capitalist society to Socialism.

Fourier's scheme of changing, by means of phalansteries, the water of all the seas into tasty lemonade was surely a phantastic idea. But Bernstein, proposing to change the sea of capitalist bitterness into a sea of socialist sweetness, by progressively pouring into it bottles of social reformist lemonade, presents an idea that is merely more insipid but no less phantastic.