Quotes About Collectivism

Apart from whether collectivism, the "communist vermin," is a danger to decent life, the communism gnawing at his entrails was no more than a natural longing for something better, a protest against persistent hunger transformed into a love for this strange doctrine, whose essence he could never grasp but whose translation, "bread for the poor," was something which he understood and, more importantly, filled him with hope.

We hold that what one man cannot morally do, a million men cannot morally do, and government, representing many millions of men, cannot do.

If I could press a button and have all of Sequoia Capital on the Midas List, I would choose to do that over a honoring a single individual.

Delegation is about private ownership of one's work, and in the communist system, there simply was no private ownership.

We lost our minds in the '80s and '90s; we really as a society just felt that everyone could only care about themselves. There was no responsibility to discuss what's going on in your town, your state, your nation. And it was a blast, it was really fun, but it doesn't work.

You take a bunch of people who don't seem any different from you and me, but when you add them all together you get this sort of huge raving maniac with national borders and an anthem.

you know as well as I do that, individually, the English are very estimable and frequently generous, but that, once banded together to form a nation, they become unbearable.

That is why the individual man is the bearer of good and evil, and not, on the one hand, any separate part of a man, or on the other hand, any collection of men. To believe that there can be good and evil in a collection of human beings, over and above the good or evil in the various individuals, is an error; moreover, it is an error which leads straight to totalitarianism, and is therefore dangerous.

wanted them to claim their own actions by saying "I" instead of "we," but here there was no "I." Even "we" did not exist without the permission of their Great Leader.

The farther a society progresses, the more clearly the individual becomes the antithesis of the group.

I believe people think as a group more often than we might realize or care to admit. We like to believe that we act as individuals and nothing more, but time and again - in corporations and business, in politics and religion, in fashion and culture, and in friendships and social circles - we think and do as one.

Ants are good citizens, they place group interests first.

Ogni mattina con la precisione delle sei ruote alla stessa ora e allo stesso minuto, noi, milioni, ci alziamo come un essere solo. Alla stessa unica ora, milioni in uno cominciamo il lavoro e milioni in uno lo terminiamo [...].

We aim at something more sublime and more equitable—the common good, or the community of goods…. We demand, we would have, the communal enjoyment of the fruits of the earth, fruits which are for everyone.

Since the end of WWII, France's steady movement away from Western ideas of individual liberty and self-determination - and toward collectivist action and conformance - has created a people overly dependent on government, hobbled by crippling taxes and lacking in individual initiative.

We have lied to ourselves. We have not built this box for the good of our brothers. We built it for its own sake. It is above all our brothers to us, and its truth above their truth.

With them the individual counted for nothing. No one was irreplaceable, because they drew no distinction between one man and another... In this community there was harmony, but no love.

We will enter into a new phase in which the Leviathan, so to speak, will become the body formed to make possible the incarnation and the manifestation of a principle and a higher order: with that, the collectivistic and irrational aspect of the principle of totalitarianism and authority will be surpassed and will again implement a type of truly spiritual and traditional hierarchical organization.

There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.

If in previous decades large historic events drew people together and oriented them toward collective action, the recent double trend toward greater choice but less security leads the young to see their lives in more individual terms. Big events collectivize. Little events atomize.

There are strengths in Islamic tradition. Islam actually, as a monotheistic religion, which defined man as a responsible agent by itself, created the idea of the individual in the Middle East and saved it from the communitarianism, the collectivism of the tribe.

We regard our living together not as an unfortunate mishap warranting endless competition among us but as a deliberate act of God to make us a community of brothers and sisters jointly involved in the quest for a composite answer to the varied problems of life. Hence in all we do we always place man first and hence all our action is usually joint community oriented action rather than the individualism." - Steven Biko

Behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil, and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting syllables in unison. p. 100

behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison.