Quotes About 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.

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.

Think of the problem of the world as a cart. It has to have two wheels. If you have one wheel, the cart doesn't go. If you have one wheel called socialism, it doesn't go. If you have only one wheel called capitalism, it doesn't go. It needs two wheels. These two wheels are capitalism and socialism.

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

To paraphrase Karl Marx, the great Karl Marx, a specter is haunting the streets of Copenhagen...Capitalism is the specter, almost nobody wants to mention it...Socialism, the other specter Karl Marx spoke about, which walks here too, rather it is like a counter-specter. Socialism, this is the direction, this is the path to save the planet, I don't have the least doubt. Capitalism is the road to hell, to the destruction of the world.

If we had had time and the occasion to develop a new socialism in the GDR, socialism with a human face, with democracy, this might have been an example also to West Germany. The development would have run the other way.

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.

There is no democracy without socialism, and no socialism without democracy.

Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.

As an American I am of course fundamentally opposed to democracy and to anyone advocating or defending democracy, which in theory and practice is the basis of socialism.

Somebody once asked me what had attracted me to National Socialism. I replied without a shadow of hesitation: 'Its beauty.'

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.

There are words bandied about that are being misused - words like 'socialism,' words like 'communism,' words like 'fascism.

Capitalism works. In the end, socialism imploded on itself. Communism imploded on itself. Ultimately jihadism will implode on itself, if we stay in the fight and stay on offense because failed philosophies don't work, there's no future.

The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.

Democracy and socialism are means to an end, not the end itself.

I think I got disappointed over the years about New York, about the States. You know, sometimes you go and visit Europe and see good old socialism in its good part! You see public concern about art, and young people's participation and young faces in the audience.

The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity, is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism.

The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of 'liberalism,' they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.

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.

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.

But Socialism, alone, can bring self-determination of their peoples.

The system that would stand midway between capitalism and socialism.

Every part of our program of perestroika - and the program as a whole, for that matter - is fully based on the principle of more socialism and more democracy.

Socialism lays an bad egg by killing the capitalism that lays the golden eggs

Socialism of any type leads to a total destruction of the human spirit...

As I've watched the Berlin Wall come down, the cry for freedom in China, and the eastern bloc nations, I rejoice, because I see the bankruptcy of Marxist-Leninism, socialism in this world.

Gasahol is socialism's fuel.

Despite the miracles of capitalism, it doesn't do well in popularity polls. One of the reasons is that capitalism is always evaluated against the non-existent, non-realizable utopias of socialism or communism. Any earthly system, when compared to a Utopia, will pale in comparison. But for the ordinary person, capitalism, with all of its warts, is superior to any system yet devised to deal with our everyday needs and desires.

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 basic struggle today is not between individualism and collectivism, free enterprise and socialism, democracy and dictatorship. These are only the superficial manifestations of a deeper struggle which is moral and spiritual and involves above all else whether man shall exist for the state, or the state for man, and whether freedom is of the spirit or a concession of a materialized society.

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.

I take a much more pragmatic view than many people on the Left about working with Neil Kinnock. Kinnock represents the best vehicle possible for achieving socialism now.

I think things are imploding on the Democrats, and I actually think this is one of the reasons why the media is so desperate, because despite all the minutia and detail here, in the real world, the things the Democrat Party believes in are failing all over the world, not just here in the United States. The Obama administration was an economic disaster, was an economic failure. Liberalism, socialism around the world is imploding.

Socialism destroys the incentive to produce, dampens the human spsirit and results, ultimately , in less for everyone.

I don't like the spirit of socialism - I think freedom is the basis of everything.

Socialism and interventionism. Both have in common the goal of subordinating the individual unconditionally to the state.

We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I'm talking about the white masses, I'm talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don't fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism.

The reason socialism has failed around the world every time it's been tried is because people in socialist countries have looked at the United States and have said if they can have it that good, we can. It's a failed, flawed ideology, but if you ask socialists why it's always failed, it's because the United States has stood in the way.

Carli Fiorina says companies are consolidating because it's the only way to compete with big, corrupt government. "This is how socialism starts." Is that also why she bought Compaq when she was CEO of Hewlett-Packard?

National Socialism would have every German decide for himself on spiritual questions, just as in the days of Frederick the Great. The National Socialist state gives to the church what belongs to the church, and to the state what belongs to the state.

There is only one hope for mankind - and that is democratic Socialism.

Socialism is not a science, a sociology in miniature: it is a cry of pain.

I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events.

Socialism is practical, in the best sense of the term; a living, vital force of inestimable value to society.

The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual property rights.