Quotes About Communism

Socialism and Communism are extremely attractive to a superficial observer. It is not until you get into the details, or actually experience it, that it becomes apparent that it does not work.

The animosity that the overwhelming majority of Americans felt toward domestic communists and their sympathizers between 1917 and 1944—an attitude that typically was more intense and more consistent than the public's generally distrustful but varying views of the U.S.S.R.—helps to explain why America's international/domestic Cold War developed so swiftly after the wartime alliance with Russia ended. U.S.-Soviet

An early gesture was to rename Harrington Road after a hero of the world communist movement, so that at the height of the Vietnam War the address of the United States Consulate was 7 Ho Chi Minh Sarani, Calcutta.

A true believer may spend a sleepless night doubting God. But what keeps a Communist awake at night is his fear there is a God. His wishful thinking is that God does not exist. For if there is no God, there is no Judge and, therefore, no judgment for his wickedness. But if there is a God, he knows he will not fare well before him. Or that God will make demands on him he does not wish to fulfill.

Orwell was dealing with communism and his disillusionment with communism in Russia and what he saw the communists do in Spain. His novel was a response to those political situations. Whereas I was interested in more things than the political atmosphere. I was considering the whole social atmosphere: the impact of TV and radio and the lack of education. I could see the coming event of schoolteachers not teaching reading anymore. The less they taught, the more you wouldn't need books.

Comrade" was a word much in vogue under Communism, which tried to foist equality even on friendship by making all men and women equally one's friend in the forthcoming (it hasn't quite arrived yet) just society. But in the social sense friendship isn't about equality. Quite the reverse. By its nature friendship is preferential: one chooses one person over another to draw closer to; an element of exclusivity is implied in the word "friend.

During the Vietnam War, Sontag went off to Hanoi as one of those people Lenin called "useful idiots"—that is, people who could be expected to defend Communism without any interest in investigating the brutality behind it.

In Communist countries they take writers very seriously—so seriously that they often kill them.

The devil, of course, was totalitarianism, in particular fascism and Communism, which promised its adherents heaven and brought them unmitigated hell.

It evolved from my experience in the fifties, growing up during the McCarthy era, and hearing a lot of assumptions that America was wonderful and Communism was terrible.

I was asked something about the economic problem of Communism. I answered, citing Dostoyevsky: "The problem of Communism is not an economic problem. The problem of Communism is the problem of atheism.

Economics is not the central problem of this century. It is a relative problem which can be solved in relative ways. Faith is the central problem of this age. The Western world does not know it, but it already possesses the answer to this problem-but only provided that its faith in God and the freedom He enjoins is as great as Communism's faith in Man.

Men who sincerely abhorred the word Communism in the pursuit of common ends found that they were unable to distinguish Communists from themselves. . . . For men who could not see that what they firmly believed was liberalism added up to socialism could scarcely be expected to see what added up to Communism. Any charge of Communism enraged them precisely because they could not grasp the differences between themselves and those against whom it was made.

The No. 1 source in the State Department was Alger Hiss, who was then an assistant to the Assistant Secretary of State, Francis Sayre, the son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson. The No. 2 source in the same Department was Henry Julian Wadleigh, an expert in the Trade Agreements Division, to which he had managed to have himself transferred from the Agriculture Department. He had done so at the request of the Communist Party

He was explaining how capitalism is bad--and I could see he had a point, but at the same time, I got the feeling that socialism or communism, or whatever he's selling, is probably just as bad, and the problem is human beings can ruin anything, even if it's a good idea to begin with.

He was afraid that if communism collapsed, the Soviet Union would no longer serve as a beacon for those in the West who believed capitalism to be unjust." "The useful idiots.

If I were asked the difference between Socialism and Communism, I could only reply that the Socialist tries to lead us to disaster by foolish words and the Communist could try to drive us there by violent deeds.

There are two non-God religions, Nazism and Communism – two peas … Tweedledum and Tweedledee. You leave out God and you substitute the Devil. You leave out love and you substitute hate.

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders," Churchill observed in his memoirs, "but it may be doubted whether any mistake in history has equaled that of which Stalin and the Communist Chiefs were guilty when they . . . supinely awaited or were incapable of realizing, the fearful onslaught which impended upon Russia.

Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this.

Churchill took a much cooler view. 'Trying to maintain good relations with a Communist is like wooing a crocodile,' he told Sir Alan Brooke. 'You do not know whether to tickle it under the chin or to beat it over the head. When it opens its mouth you cannot tell whether it is trying to smile or preparing to eat you up.

It's neither Marxism nor Communism I repudiate; the use certain people have made of Marxism and Communism is what I condemn. What I want is that Marxism and Communism be harnessed into the service of coloured peoples, and not coloured people into the service of Marxism and Communism. That the doctrine and the movement be tailored to fit men, not men to fit the movement. And - of course - that goes for others besides Communists.

The corruption at the heart of Communist ideology lay in the means. Social justice, greater freedom and equality, an end to exploitation and alienation are noble, humane ends. What compromised them fatally was the inhuman methods employed to achieve them. This was as true of Lenin and Trotsky as of Stalin.

There were moments when Szara suspected that many idealists drawn to Communism were, at heart, people with an appetite for clandestine life.