Quotes About Socialism

Socialism is a wonderful idea. It is only as a reality that it has been disastrous. Among people of every race, color, and creed, all around the world, socialism has led to hunger in countries that used to have surplus food to export.... Nevertheless, for many of those who deal primarily in ideas, socialism remains an attractive idea -- in fact, seductive. Its every failure is explained away as due to the inadequacies of particular leaders.

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.

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.

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

The socialism that India can assimilate is the socialism of the spinning wheel.

Enough generations of socialist policies have now passed for us to judge their effects. They are bleak. Socialism undermines the character of a nation and of its citizens. In simpler words, socialism makes people worse.

Successful socialism depends on the perfectibility of man. Unless all, or nearly all, men are high-minded and clear-sighted, it isbound to be a rotten failure in any but a physical sense. Even through it is altruism, socialism means materialism. You can guarantee the things of the body to every one, but you cannot guarantee the things of the spirit to every one; you can guarantee only that the opportunity to seek them shall not be denied to any one who chooses to seek them.

Our movement took a grip on cowardly Marxism and from it extracted the meaning of socialism. It also took from the cowardly middle-class parties their nationalism. Throwing both into the cauldron of our way of life there emerged, as clear as a crystal, the synthesis -- German National Socialism.

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.

Only the defeat of the proletariat in Germany in 1923 gave the decisive push to the creation of Stalin's theory of national socialism: the downward curve of the revolution gave rise to Stalinism, not to the theory of the permanent revolution, which was first formulated by me in 1905. This theory is not bound to a definite calendar of revolutionary events; it only reveals the world-wide interdependence of the revolutionary process.

Less than seventy-five years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won.

Ideology on which the Kyoto Protocol is based, is a new form of totalitarian ideology, along with Marxism, Communism and socialism. We had doubts about the Kyoto Protocol, we wanted reasoning from our partners in the European Union, in the IPCC. Formal requests had been sent to these organizations. But we have not received responses yet, which suggests that no coherent answers can be offered. What we hear is 'it is not comprehensive responses that matter, we will not give them anyway; what is important is whether you believe us or not'.

Socialism is the triumph of people's prejudices over their reason.

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

Forget socialism, capitalism, just-in-time deliveries, salary surveys, and the rest ... concentrate on building organizations that accomplish that most difficult of all challenges: to make people look forward to coming to work in the morning.

There are few problems in the world that economic prosperitycannot help solve. Yet the engines of that prosperity are under fierceattack. The forces that seek power over others have gained the upperhand against those that seek freedom. By harming wealth creation,they cause even more strain on society. Historically, this is nothingnew. State domination over its subjects has roots that connect statism,totalitarianism, communism, and socialism to more modern-day variantsof liberalism and progressivism. It is a constant fight and we mustwin.

The reason this country continues its drift toward socialism and big nanny government is because too many people vote in the expectation of getting something for nothing, not because they have a concern for what is good for the country.

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

It is fundamental to Socialism that we should liquidate the British Empire as soon as we can.

Communist regimes were not some unfortunate aberration, some historical deviation from a socialist ideal. They were the ultimate expression, unconstrained by democratic and electoral pressures, of what socialism is all about. ... In short, the state [is] everything and the individual nothing.

I was not chosen to be president to restore capitalism to Cuba. I was elected to defend, maintain and continue to perfect socialism, not destroy it.

We're going to fight racism not with racism, but we're going to fight with solidarity. We say we're not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we're going to fight it with socialism.

Socialism and Communism both demand a degree of joint effort and administration which would beget more regulation than is wholly consistent with ideal Anarchism; Individualism and Mutualism, resting upon property, involve a development of the private policeman not at all compatible with my notion of freedom.

Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.

Most conservatives know better than to promote the state funding of art. The result of such funding is the mess that modern art has become. Atonal music is to music what subsidized art is to art. ...The fact that cacophony has reigned almost supreme since 1900 is a testimony to Mises' original observation. Atonal music is to music what socialism is to economics: planned chaos.

If we close our eyes to the dark sides of the workers' State which we have helped to create, we shall never reach socialism.

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

Capitalism will always survive, because socialism will be there to save it.

I think you hear, at least as an undertone, and it's going to grow louder, is that we believe that capitalism is the mantra of the day and anything that creeps towards socialism is a problem.

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.

Many people consider the things government does for them to be social progress but they regard the things government does for others as socialism.

What I mean by Socialism is a condition of society in which there should be neither rich nor poor, neither master nor master's man, neither idle nor overworked, neither brain­slack brain workers, nor heart­sick hand workers, in a word, in which all men would be living in equality of condition, and would manage their affairs unwastefully, and with the full consciousness that harm to one would mean harm to all - the realisation at last of the meaning of the word 'commonwealth.'

People decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the bad.

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.

We Communists never conceal our political views. Definitely and beyond all doubt, our future or maximum program is to carry China forward to socialism and communism. Both the name of our Party and our Marxist world outlook unequivocally point to this supreme ideal of the future, a future of incomparable brightness and splendor.

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.

Socialism is a new form of slavery.

In the last few years we have learned to distinguish the means of Socialism from the ends.

Communism and socialism, programs for intellectual control over society ... fascism, a program for the social control of intellect.

I am a socialist, so I am not worried about socialism. I am worried about dictators who are putting everyone into a socialist state for their own benefit.

Socialism never took root in America.

The real case against socialism is not its economic inefficiency, though on all sides there is evidence of that. Much more fundamental is its basic immorality.

In the bureaucratic machine of socialism the way toward promotion is not achievement but the favor of the superiors.

Ours is a system of corporate socialism, where companies capitalize their profits and socialize their losses…in effect, they tax you for their accidents, bungling, boondoggles, and mismanagement, just like a government. We should be able to deselect them.

Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English.

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.

I believe that for the past twenty years there has been a creeping socialism spreading in the United States.