Quotes About Socialism

Socialism, like democracy, is an attitude of mind

Socialist personality in German. In East Germany and the rest of the Soviet bloc, a prescribed set of attitudes and behaviours that confirmed you as politically correct. In theory, the socialist personality was a repository of moral rectitude and 'class consciousness'. In practice, it was an embodiment of that long-suffering creature Homo sovieticus, and effectively meant not having a face, a name, or a destiny, unless it was the right one.

Social democracy, one of the dominant forces shaping Western European politics in the two generations following World War II, has been in retreat.

The 19th century was the age of Individualism the 20th and 21st are the ages of Socialism.

Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.

The fundamental duel between which seemed to be that between colonialism and anti-colonialism, and indeed between capitalism and socialism, is already losing some of its importance. What counts today, the question which is looming on the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity must reply to this question, or be shaken to pieces by it.

The basic confrontation which seemed to be colonialism versus anti-colonialism, indeed capitalism versus socialism, is already losing its importance. What matters today, the issue which blocks the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences may be.

Kurt Schumacher, the Hanover-based anti-Nazi who quickly became the leading figure in the post-war Social Democratic Party, was outraged. 'Wir sind kein Negervolk' ('We are not blacks') the fiery former concentration-camp inmate told Annan.

It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide.

Socialism is the phantastic younger brother of despotism, which it wants to inherit. Socialism wants to have the fullness of state force which before only existed in despotism. ... However, it goes further than anything in the past because it aims at the formal destruction of the individual ... who ... can be used to improve communities by an expedient organ of government.

All Socialism Involves Slavery.

The income tax is a twentieth-century socialist experiment that has failed. Before the income tax was imposed on us just 80 years ago, government had no claim to our income. Only sales, excise, and tariff taxes were allowed.

I'm a very bad Christian, but I am a Christian. I think that all women, unless they are absolutely asleep, must be feminists up to a point. And socialist, well yes, of course, it's not a fashionable word, but I am very much of the Left.

I think I got disappointed over the years about New York, about the States. You know, sometimes you go and visit Europe and see good old socialism in its good part! You see public concern about art, and young people's participation and young faces in the audience.

A young man who isn't a socialist hasn't got a heart; an old man who is a socialist hasn't got a head.

In 1967 I entered Harvard as a freshman, confident - in the way that only 17-year-olds are - that I could change the world. My major was African Studies, and my plan was to travel to Tanzania, where President Julius Nyerere was creating a government based on democracy and socialism.

I'm still a communist in the sense that I don't believe the world will survive with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer - I think that the pressures will get so tremendous that the social contract will just come apart.

All that the socialists understand about money is the fact that they want it from others.

Whoever wants to reach socialism by any other path than that of political democracy will inevitably arrive at conclusions that are absurd and reactionary both in the economic and the political sense.

The new arrivals from Eastern Europe were ragged, dirt-poor, culturally energetic, toughened by years of torment, idealistic, and socialistic.

El Posmodernismo es la estrategia epistemológica de la izquierda académica, para responder a la crisis provocada por los fracasos del socialismo en la teoría y en la práctica".

Some wags surmised the Western powers refrained from unseating the Soviet regime to give socialists around the world more time to see the full folly of their delusions.)

Bolshevik socialism (anticapitalism) attracted and gave meaning to the shock-troop activists, supplied the vocabulary and worldview of millions in the party and beyond, and achieved a monopoly over the public sphere, but this same politically empowering ideology afforded no traction over the international situation or the faltering quasi-market domestic economy.

Socialism, like every other impassioned human effort, will flourish best under martyrdom. It will languish and perish in the dry sunlight of open discussion.