Quotes About Communism

Capitalism has survived communism. Now, it eats away at itself.

Of course, to have admitted that you hated football while you were working on STEAMING would have been a bit like one of the US president's staffers confessing to thinking religion was overrated, abstinence didn't work, and what the country really needed was a short sharp dose of communism with a side order of Islamic extremism to go.

Russian espionage directed against the West has been rising since 2001. We kind of forgot that you don't need communism to set up an east/west squabble between the Russian Empire and Western Europe—in fact, communism was a distraction.

Now the battle against communism has been reconfigured. The seat of Satan is no longer in the Kremlin. It has been assumed by individuals and institutions promoting a rival religion called "secular humanism.

Most people in this country believe that the American Communist Party and its dupes are the chief internal enemy of our economic system and our form of government. This is a serious mistake.

I think anytime that you go to the extreme of any mode of economics, be it capitalism or communism, you have these feedback mechanisms that make the system turn in on itself.

Ryan asked, "Is there any economist in the world who correlates Russia's increased authoritarianism with their increased economic growth?" Helen Glass thought for a moment. "Sure, you can find some who will say just that, but remember, there were economists predicting the fall of capitalism and the rise of world communism, even in the eighties." Jack laughed. "Good point. You can always find an expert to confirm your belief, no matter how ridiculous.

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.

dialectics, as a veteran communist explained . . . 'is the art and technique of always landing on your feet.

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).

Western intellectual enthusiasm for Communism tended to peak not in times of 'goulash Communism' or 'Socialism with a human face', but rather at the moments of the regime's worst cruelties: 1935–39 and 1944–56. Writers, professors, artists, teachers and journalists frequently admired Stalin not in spite of his faults, but because of them. It was when he was murdering people on an industrial scale

As the progressive Abbé Boulier explained to François Fejtö, when trying to prevent him from writing about the Rajk trial: drawing attention to Communist sins is 'to play the imperialists' game'.11

This sort of faith was widespread in Kohout's generation. As Milosz would observe, Communism operated on the principle that writers need not think, they need only understand. And even understanding required little more than commitment, which was precisely what young intellectuals in the region were looking for.

enthusiasm for Communism in theory was characteristically present in inverse proportion to direct experience of it in practice.

Among the speakers at the graveside was Viktor Orbán, the young leader of the Young Democrats, who could not help noting that some of the Communists present at Nagy's reburial were the same who, just a few years before, had so strenuously falsified the very revolution whose praises they were now singing.

the center of gravity of political argument in the years after 1945 lay not between left and right but rather within the left: between communists and their sympathizers and the mainstream liberal-social-democratic consensus.

This familiarity of revolutionary violence in the French imaginaire, together with sepia-tinted memories of the old Franco-Russian alliance, pre-disposed intellectuals in France to greet Communist apologetics for Soviet brutality with a distinctly sympathetic ear.

In the conventional wisdom of the 1940s, the political polarizations of the last inter-war decade were born directly of economic depression and its social cost. Both Fascism and Communism thrived on social despair, on the huge gulf separating rich and poor.

It is one of the curiosities of Communist reformers that they always set out with the quixotic goal of reforming some aspects of their system while keeping others unaffected—introducing market-oriented incentives while maintaining central planning controls, or allowing greater freedom of expression while retaining the Party's monopoly of truth.

Communism was now forever to be associated with oppression, not revolution. For forty years the Western Left had looked to Russia, forgiving and even admiring Bolshevik violence as the price of revolutionary self-confidence and the march of History. Moscow was the flattering mirror of their political illusions. In November 1956, the mirror shattered.

But never again—and this was the true lesson of 1968, first for the Czechs but in due course for everyone else—never again would it be possible to maintain that Communism rested on popular consent, or the legitimacy of a reformed Party, or even the lessons of History.

Why did Communism collapse so precipitously in 1989? We should not indulge the sirens of retrospective determinism, however seductive. Even if Communism was doomed by its inherent absurdities, few predicted the timing and the manner of its going.

Both Fascism and Communism thrived on social despair, on the huge gulf separating rich and poor. If the democracies were to recover, the 'condition of the people' question must be addressed. In the words of Thomas Carlyle a hundred years earlier, 'if something be not done, something will do itself one day, and in a fashion that will please nobody.

The new OS is neither the classic communism of centralized planning without private property nor the undiluted selfish chaos of a free market. Instead, it is an emerging design space in which decentralized public coordination can solve problems and create things that neither pure communism nor pure capitalism can.