Quotes About Socialism

While capitalism has a visible cost - profit - that does not exist under socialism, socialism has an invisible cost - inefficiency - that is eradicated under capitalism through losses and bankruptcy.

Like many white citizens over the years, members of the Council believed that anything that weakened white supremacy or challenged the existing social hierarchy in any way was socialism. But this was largely code for preserving the country's racial caste system, centuries in the making.

Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom; socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.

There's Socialism and Communism and Capitalism and there's Feminism and Hedonism, and there's Catholicism and Bipedalism and Consumerism, but I think Narcissism is the system that means the most to me.

the 20th century morality tale of 'socialism vs. freedom' or 'communism vs. capitalism' is misleading. Capitalism is not a political system; it is a form of economic life, compatible in practice with right-wing dictatorships (Chile under Pinochet), left-wing dictatorships (contemporary China), social-democratic monarchies (Sweden) and plutocratic republics (the United States).

The predictable effect of such a system was to encourage not just stagnation and inefficiency but a permanent cycle of corruption. It is one of the paradoxes of the Socialist project that the absence of property tends to generate more corruption, not less.

The intellectual opposition in Central Europe had little immediate impact. This surprised no-one: the new realism of the Seventies-era dissidents encompassed not just a disabused grasp of Socialism's failure but also a clear-sighted appreciation of the facts of power. There

If social democracy has a future, it will be as a social democracy of fear.

Socialism for social democrats, especially in Scandinavia, was a distributive concept. It was about making sure that wealth and assets were not disproportionately gathered into the hands of a privileged few. And this, as we have seen, was in essence a moral matter:

An older generation of free market economists used to point out that what is wrong with socialist planning is that it requires the sort of perfect knowledge (of present and future alike) that is never vouchsafed to ordinary mortals. They were right. But it transpires that the same is true for market theorists:

Mladí d?stojníci, s nimiž jsem byl v kontaktu, pocházeli pÃ…â"¢edevÅ¡ím z metropolí a mÄ›st, ne z kibuc?, a díky nim jsem pochopil, co jsem mÄ›l chápat už dávno: že sen o venkovském socialismu je právÄ› jen sen. T?žiÅ¡tÄ› židovského státu budou a musí pÃ…â"¢edstavovat mÄ›sta.

Why, after decades of internal violence and foreign aggression, did the world's first Socialist society implode without even trying to defend itself? One answer, of course, is that it never really existed in the first place: that, in the words of the historian Martin Malia, 'there is no such thing as socialism, and the Soviet Union built

Nothing, of course, is ever quite as good as we remember. The social democratic consensus and the welfare institutions of the postwar decades coincided with some of the worst town planning and public housing of modern times. From Communist Poland through

And nearly all socialists, like most other Oklahomans, were devout Christians. They flocked to yearly encampments that blended a faith in Jesus with a belief in socialism. At one gathering, a preacher proclaimed, "Christ's church was a working class church" and cited the verse from Ecclesiastes that decrees "the Profit of the Earth is for all."5

And conservatives who view socialism as unpatriotic might also ponder why Francis Bellamy, author of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag in 1892, was an avowed Christian socialist.

Even in the difficult circumstances when we were healing the war wounds and promoting the socialist revolution and construction, we introduced universal free compulsory education step by step, combined school education with social education and developed the study-while-you-work system so that all the younger generation and working people could receive education at state expense.

Of course Sartre and Beauvoir were not alone in being seduced by Communism. Many of the Auden generation, on both sides of the Channel, had become infatuated with the socialist 'paradise', and remained blind to its atrocities.

Criminals are free and make choices. Responsibility accrues and repentance is required. Among Dostoevsky's many complaints against socialism . . . was its promise to replace this radical freedom with material and mental security. Hence one of Dostoevsky's great paradoxes: the healthy, free mind demands continual destabilization and doubt if it is to exercise acts of faith, but our deeds are stable, answerable, and belong to us alone.

Socialism is an insurance policy bought by all the members of a national economy to shield them from risk. But the result is to shield them from knowledge of the real dangers and opportunities.

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.

The Berlin Wall is the defining achievement of socialism.

All the future of socialism resides in the autonomous development of workers' syndicates

Property is theft.

All Socialism involves slavery.