Quotes About Socialism

The strongest argument for socialism is that it sounds good. The strongest argument against socialism is that it doesn't work. But those who live by words will always have a soft spot in their hearts for socialism because it sounds so good.

We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.

I am a socialist. However, I have to add that what I understand by socialism is exactly the opposite of what many people, or most people, today mean by socialism.

Socialism constitutes a threat to the present and future welfare of the human race, in the sense that neither socialism nor any other known substitute for the market order could sustain the current population of the world.

Socialism and communism are set up so that a select few elite get most of everything and the rest of society is equally miserable in poverty and oppression. So if you can be in the ruling party elite, socialism, communism, you've got it made. That's less than one half of one-tenth a percent of the population in those countries.

I can prophecy that your grandchildren in America will live under socialism -- Our firm conviction is that sooner or later Capitalism will give way to Socialism. Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you.

State ownership and control is not necessarily Socialism - if it were, then the Army, the Navy, the Police, the Judges, the Gaolers, the Informers, and the Hangmen, all would all be Socialist functionaries, as they are State officials - but the ownership by the State of all the land and materials for labour, combined with the co-operative control by the workers of such land and materials, would be Socialism.

When socialism comes into power, the Roman Church will advocate socialism with the same vigor [with which] it is now favoring feudalism and slavery.

Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. … In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.

By now even the word socialism has so many meanings and interpretations. The Russians call themselves socialists, the Swedes call themselves. And let's not forget that in Germany there was also a national socialism.

In practice, socialism didnt work. But socialism could never have worked because it is based on false premises about human psychology and society, and gross ignorance of human economy.

In America, we don't, in daily discourse, use the words 'capitalism' or 'socialism.' They've been kind of nonexistent words, I would say, amongst the general public.

Socialism is like a dream. Sooner or later you wake up to reality.

The progress of the human race is effected by the operation of two forces which correspond in most respects to what in physics are often called, for want of better terms, the centripetal and centrifugal forces. These are the forces of convergence and divergence, the one tending to concentration of powers and properties, and the other to their separateness or the independence of parts. Socialism and Individualism are to appearance conflicting, though in reality complemental, in their relations to the societary movement.

For the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the efforts of one country are sufficient - for this we have the testimony of the history of our revolution. For the definitive victory of Socialism, for the organization of Socialist production, the efforts of one country, especially of a peasant country like Russia, are insufficient - for that are required the efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries.

Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools.

When I was young, I was all about personal sovereignty and that junk, because there was no privacy and the available ideologies were collective, both socialism/communism and nationalism.

I am convinced Socialism is the only answer.

The world is a big place, and there are many paths that lead to success. This applies to both political and economic concepts. For this reason, we see no need to stoically pursue the Chinese, American or French way. But we have socialism in common with China.

The dictatorship of the proletariat and the leadership of the Marxist-Leninist party are indispensable conditions for the triumph of the Socialist revolution and the building of Socialism.

Israel has the mentality of a small Kibbutz. Kibbutz is kind of like a small village that - actually there aren't many Kibbutz left in Israel - but it was something that was based on socialism and based on a principle that everyone is working for the Kibbutz and the Kibbutz is one.

We have among us a class of mammon worshippers, whose one test of conservatism, or radicalism, is the attitude one takes with respect to accumulated wealth. Whatever tends to preserve the wealth of the wealthy is called conservatism, and whatever favors anything else, no matter what, they call socialism.

In the past 20 years and more since China embarked on the road of reform and opening up, we have moved steadfastly to promote political restructuring and vigorously build democratic politics under socialism.

I think if we don't overthrow capitalism, we don't have a chance of saving the world ecologically. I think it is possible to have an ecologically sound society under socialism. I don't think it is possible under capitalism.

Socialism is a fundamentally different social system where the world's resources are not controlled by a greedy, undemocratic oligarchy. This is not the same as the capitalist welfare states that have existed in some European countries.

Socialism is not spontaneous. It does not arise of itself. It has abiding principles according to which the major means of production and distribution ought to be socialised if exploitation of the many by the few is to be prevented; if, that is to say, egalitarianism in the economy is to be protected.

Socialism, like Christianity destroyed itself to gain power

The free market is 'socialism' for the rich: the public pays the costs and the rich get the benefit - markets for the poor and plenty of state protection for the rich.

[A]nti-Semitism was rife in almost all varieties of socialism.

Modern American liberalism is nothing but the socialism too stupid to recognize itself in the mirror.

It is the system of nationalist individualism that has to go....We are living in the end of the sovereign states....In the great struggle to evoke a Westernized World Socialism, contemporary governments may vanish....Countless people...will hate the new world order....and will die protesting against it.

I think the rules will change and I think more and more young women are going to decide that having a family and taking care of a home is not a bad choice, but how do we subsidize it - not necessarily European-style socialism. It'll have to be a new more creative, dynamic and local solution.

To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukaemia with leeches.

Ideology on which the Kyoto Protocol is based, is a new form of totalitarian ideology, along with Marxism, Communism and socialism.

What is peddled about nowadays as philosophy, especially that of N.S. [National Socialism], but has nothing to do with the inner truth and greatness of that movement [namely the encounter between global technology and modern humanity] is nothing but fishing in that troubled sea of values and totalities.

[T]rue socialism must be voluntary - not coerced. Even in the most complete system of society we can conceive the individual must still have rights and property. He must appropriate food to sustain his life. He must wear clothes which are his. He must have his private and exclusive apartment, and must have the right to be in some place on God's earth from which he cannot be evicted by landlord of society.

The goal of socialism is communism.

Gore Vidal, the American writer, once described the American economic system as 'free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich'. Macroeconomic policy on the global scale is a bit like that. It is Keynesianism for the rich countries and monetarism for the poor.

Then there was communism's weak-tea sister, socialism. Socialists maintained that we shouldn't take all the money away from all the people since all the people don't have money. We should take all the money away from only the people who make money. Then, when we run out of that, we could take more money from the people who...hey, wait! Where'd you people go? What do you mean you're "tax exiles in Monaco?"

I certainly hoped that in the Eastern part of Germany, what was just beginning to be called the German Democratic Republic, you would develop a system of socialism with freedom and democracy.

Socialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.

If you can't bring them down economically you kill them, that's how you promote equality. You build a wall to keep them in the country. Socialism, communism, build walls to make sure people can't get out. In a country that's communist and builds a wall, there's nobody trying to get in. Works every time it's tried.

Socialism's failure in the former Soviet Union and in the other socialist countries stands as a clean and unquestionable warning as to which path any rational and sane people should never follow again. Government planning brought poverty and ruin...Unfortunately, America is not absorbing the lessons that should be learned from the socialist experience and, instead, is following the same path of destruction.

Socialism is overcoming certain difficulties, it is working in order to try to achieve social advances, to really achieve a society where everybody improves, not where just the elite improve and the others get worse.

Of course, socialism is just evil now. It's completely discredited supposedly by the collapse of the Soviet Union, but I can't help noticing that my grandchildren are heavily in hock to Communist China now which is evidently a whole lot better at business than we are.

Socialism is the religion people get when they lose their religion.

France could have all the socialism its capitalistic economy could support.

In our discussions here at the forum there was no trace of the futile debate about what is better, capitalism or socialism...We should seek a synthesis of ideas and values that have proven their viability.