Quotes About Socialism

We must ever keep in mind that collectivized socialism is part of the communist strategy. Communism is fundamentally socialism. We will never win our fight against communism by making concessions to socialism.

The struggle for socialism is the struggle for proletarian (working class) democracy. Proletarian democracy is not the crown of socialism. Socialism is the result of proletarian democracy. To the degree that the proletariat mobilizes itself and the great masses of the people, the socialist revolution is advanced. The proletariat mobilizes itself as a self-acting force through its own committees, unions, parties, and other organizations.

If Socialism can only be realized when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see Socialism for at least five hundred years.

On the world scene, it is our position that there is a resurgence of socialism taking place. The world's socialist and Communist forces are now on the move to restore socialism in the former socialist countries and to strengthen the existing socialist countries... there is a new socialist world on the horizon, a resurgence of the world revolutionary process.

Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralisation of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?

In 1949, I believed that social progress, the triumph of the proletariat, socialism would lead to the emancipation of women. But I saw that nothing came of it: first of all, that socialism was not achieved anywhere, and that in certain countries which called themselves socialist, the situation of women was no better than it was in so-called capitalist countries.

The New Deal is plainly an attempt to achieve a working socialism and avert a social collapse in America; it is extraordinarily parallel to the successive 'policies' and 'Plans' of the Russian experiment. Americans shirk the word 'socialism', but what else can one call it?

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.

The trouble is with socialism, which resembles a form of mental illness more than it does a philosophy. Socialists get bees in their bonnets. And because they chronically lack any critical faculty to examine and evaluate their ideas, and because they are pathologically unwilling to consider the opinions of others, and most of all, because socialism is a mindset that regards the individual and his rights as insignificant, compared to whatever the socialist believes the group needs, terrible, terrible things happen when socialists acquire power.

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.

Just as feudalism was an advance over slavery, and capitalism was the next step after feudalism, socialism is the next step after capitalism...........Socialism in America will come through the ballot box.

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.

The two principles referred to are Authority and Liberty, and the names of the two schools of Socialistic thought which fully and unreservedly represent one or the other of them are, respectively, State Socialism and Anarchism. Whoso knows what these two schools want and how they propose to get it understands the Socialistic movement. For, just as it has been said that there is no half-way house between Rome and Reason, so it may be said that there is no half-way house between State Socialism and Anarchism.

Inflation makes the extension of socialism possible by providing the financial chaos in which it flourishes. The fact is that socialism and inflation are cause and effect, they feed on each other!

Three hundred years after its appearance Christianity was the recognized state religion in the Roman World Empire, and in barely sixty years socialism has won itself a position which makes its victory absolutely certain.

If they were going to go to London or to the UK to find out how health care is, national health care doesn't work, all they have to do is go to the Soviet Union to find out how communism and socialism didn't work, but it hasn't dissuaded them from trying it here because they think the only thing that hasn't happened is the right people haven't tried it with the proper funding.

The socialism of our day has done good service in setting men to thinking how certain civilizing benefits, now only enjoyed by theopulent, can be enjoyed by all.

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

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.

As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I'll tell you. It is because socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on horseback. The slaves won't stand for it. They are too many, and willy-nilly they'll drag down the would-be equestrian before he gets astride. You can't get away from them, and you'll have to swallow the whole slave-morality. It's not a nice mess, I'll allow. But it's been a-brewing and swallow it you must.

While I have questions about the language used in describing the two economic systems, I think people have fairly good gut sense of the difference between socialism and capitalism.

The two principles referred to are Authority and Liberty, and the names of the two schools of Socialistic thought which fully and unreservedly represent one or the other of them are, respectively, State Socialism and Anarchism.

In the usual (though certainly not in every) public decision on economic policy, the choice is between courses that are almost equally good or equally bad. It is the narrowest decisions that are most ardently debated. If the world is lucky enough to enjoy peace, it may even one day make the discovery, to the horror of doctrinaire free-enterprisers and doctrinaire planners alike, that what is called capitalism and what is called socialism are both capable of working quite well.

National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable.

Protectionism, socialism, all varieties of state favoritism and restrictions on competition, and the growth of bureaucracy and jobbery were the means by which special interests sought to exploit the public, the great mass of consumers and taxpayers.

The main vice of capitalism is the uneven distribution of prosperity. The main vice of socialism is the even distribution of misery.

As a result, socialism and communism, in particular, use government to suppress religion to such a degree as to leave the one true God out entirely.

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.

The fundamental reason why Medicare is failing is why the Soviet Union failed - socialism doesn't work.

Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement. It is by no means an obvious remedy for the obvious evil which the interests of that class will necessarily demand. It is a construction of theorists.

Capitalism is chronically unstable.Boom and bust has always marked capitalism in the United States. There were panics in 1785, 1791, 1819, 1857, 1869, 1873, 1907, 1929 and 1987.In economies and politics, as in war, an astonishing number of people die, like the man on the railway crossing, defending their right of way. This is a poorly developed instinct in Switzerland. No country so firmly avows the principles of private enterprise but in few have the practical concessions to socialism been more numerous and varied.

To overthrow the power of the bourgeoisie and to establish the power of the proletariat in one country still does not signify the full victory of Socialism.

The Russians have succeeded in one thing: they have sold the world the idea that they represent socialism and the ideas of Marx,and we have done the greatest service to their propaganda by agreeing that that's what it is.

Marriage is socialism among two people.

The worst of this ever growing cancer of Statism [ie big 'paternal' government - socialism, communism and fascism] is its moral effect. The country is rich enough to stand its frightful economic wastage for a long time yet, and still prosper, but it is already so poverty-stricken in its moral resources that the present drain will quickly run them out.

Gasahol is socialism's fuel.

[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.

Ronald Reagan was an anti-government, union-busting, race baiting, anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-intellectual, who cut rich people's taxes in half, had a incurable case of the military-industrial complex, and said Medicare was socialism that would destroy our freedom. Both sides really should stop pretending he was something other than the man most responsible for our decline.

The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.

[The] zero-sum caricature [applies] much more accurately to socialism, which stifles the creation of new wealth and thus fosters a dog-eat-dog struggle over existing material resources.

I don't have time to beat around the bush. The health-care plan as proposed by Mrs. Clinton is socialism. There's no soft way to peddle it. There is not other way to describe it.

Social justice is group psychology, it's group rights, it's collectivisim, and it's a negation of individual responsibility, which is what the Bible teaches. Individual responsibility. And of course, social justice leads very quickly to socialism, and ultimately to communism.

If socialism gave more prosperity than capitalism does, I would still prefer capitalism - as it gives more freedom. Luckily, though, I do not have to face this dillema.

Socialism is in no way a curate's egg

I would like to suggest to you that the extent to which government in America has departed from the original design of in habiting the destructive actions of man and invoking a common justice; the extent to which government has invaded the productive and creative areas; the extent to which the government in this country has assumed the responsibility for the security, welfare, and prosperity of our people is a measure of the extent to which socialism has developed here in this land of ours.

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it.

Inherent to socialism is the absence of choice. If I want to choose my own pretzels or books or iphones, they prevent me - they fine me, or imprison me. And those systems, not infrequently have historically, have developed into systems where there are pogroms.

It's much harder to bring about socialism through legal means, because there are so many possibilities for opposition.