Quotes About Socialism

Like most terms of political discourse, socialism has more or less, lost its meaning. Socialism used to mean something. If you go back far enough it meant basically control of production by producers, elimination of wage labor, democratization of all spheres of life; production, commerce, education, media, workers control of factories, community control of communities, and so on. That was socialism once. But it hasn't meant that for a hundred years. Socialism meant something different.

I call both the left and right wings socialism. And today, the right-wingers love to think that they're capitalists, or free enterprisers, or what not. No they're not! The correct name for this is left-wing socialism or right-wing socialism - and both wings are on the same bird.

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 was guilty of judging capitalism by its operations and socialism by its hopes and aspirations; capitalism by its works and socialism by its literature.

Marxism is not only the theory of socialism, it is an integral world outlook, a philosophical system, from which Marx’s proletarian socialism logically follows. This philosophical system is called dialectical materialism.

The Popular Unity government represented the first attempt anywhere to build a genuinely democratic transition to socialism - a socialism that, owing to its origins, might be guided not by authoritarian bureaucracy, but by democratic self-rule.

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.

The problem of peaceful transition to socialism, we do not discuss it as a theoretical question. But in America it is very difficult, and it is nearly impossible. That is why specifically in America we say that the road to the liberation of peoples, which will be the road of socialism will go through bullets in almost all countries.

The very reason why we object to state ownership, that it puts a stop to individual initiative and to the healthy development of personal responsibility, is the reason why we object to an unsupervised, unchecked monopolistic control in private hands. We urge control and supervision by the nation as an antidote to the movement for state socialism. Those who advocate total lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism.

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.

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

Hostility towards Microsoft is not difficult to find on the Net, and it blends two strains: resentful people who feel Microsoft is too powerful, and disdainful people who think it's tacky. This is all strongly reminiscent of the heyday of Communism and Socialism, when the bourgeoisie were hated from both ends: by the proles, because they had all the money, and by the intelligentsia, because of their tendency to spend it on lawn ornaments. Microsoft is the very embodiment of modern high-tech prosperity - it is, in a word, bourgeois - and so it attracts all of the same gripes.

If governments do not ensure that, the peoples through their own efforts will ensure these changes, what we call communitarian socialism.

Here's what I don't think works: An economic system that was founded in the 16th century and another that was founded in the 19th century. I'm tired of this discussion of capitalism and socialism; we live in the 21st century, we need an economic system that has democracy as its underpinnings and an ethical code.

I recognise that Socialism has ended its purely theoretical course, and that the hour to construct has come.

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.

We cannot restore traditional American freedom unless we limit the government's power to tax. No tinkering with this, that, or the other law will stop the trend toward socialism. We must repeal the Sixteenth Amendment.

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.

Socialism has been preached for so long, the British people no longer have any sense of personal responsibility.

Under capitalism man exploits man; under socialism the reverse is true.

The socialism I believe in isn't really politics. It is a way of living. It is humanity. I believe the only way to live and to be truly successful is by collective effort, with everyone working for each other, everyone helping each other, and everyone having a share of the rewards at the end of the day. That might be asking a lot, but it's the way I see football and the way I see life.

Developments since the rise of National Socialism make it probable that the continent will be freed from its Jewish destroyers of people and exploiters forever, and the German example after the German victory in World War II will also serve to bring about the destruction of the Jewish world tormentors on other continents.

The idea was that those who direct the overall conspiracy could use the differences in those two so-called ideologies [Marxism/fascism/socialism v. democracy/capitalism] to enable them [the Illuminati] to divide larger and larger portions of the human race into opposing camps so that they could be armed and then brainwashed into fighting and destroying each other.

The great thing about being rich is, you can embrace practices that kill the poor - that's what socialism does.

Now a great debate has been born. The thesis is Democratic Socialism. The antithesis is free-market capitalism. The Obama Democrats have posed the challenge. It is now up to the Republicans to pick it up and fight along these lines.

Socialism, Communism, clandestine societies, Bible societies... pests of this sort must be destroyed by all means.

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.

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.

Now that the day of reckoning has arrived, they cry socialism!

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.

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.

There's no thought given to the individual because there aren't any individuals in socialism; everybody's the same.

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.

Democracy is indispensable to socialism.

Admittedly communism has not been achieved in Russia. State socialism has been built.

There is talk of the failure of socialism, and where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia, and in Latin America?

Socialism is a new form of slavery.

Socialism is inseparably interwoven with totalitarianism and the object worship of the state.

If we were to make no better use of victory than to countenance existing trends in this direction, only too visible before 1939, we might indeed find that we have defeated National Socialism merely to create a world of many national socialisms, differing in detail, but all equally totalitarian, nationalistic, and in recurrent conflict with each other.

... a bad attitude, that the love of money is the root of all evil and the rich are evil and greedy and all that stuff. It’s basically socialism and communism.

Our sense of the free market is variable, shifting from a more welfare-oriented model after the Great Depression to a capital-driven market after the collapse of socialism as a viable alternative.

It was with the last revolution and the coming of INGSOC (Inglish/English Socialism) that the latest High learnt how to keep their position permanently - by cultivating ignorance among the other classes and by constantly surveying them through the Thought Police. Part of this strategy included the maintenance of a state of continual warfare, which Goldstein discussed in the third chapter. The three major powers were not fighting this perpetual war for victory; they were fighting to keep a state of emergency always present as the surest guarantee of authoritarianism.

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

Socialism, on the contrary, extends its function to the description of society as it should be, and the discovery of the means of making it what it should be.

That Solidarity was a religious movement no one, least of all the Soviets, can deny. In November 1981, Pravda denounced 'religious fanaticism' as a grave challenge to socialism; failure to contain it, Pravda said, was at the root of the problems in Poland.

His [Martin Luther King] last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community, is a direct reference to angles, barbarism or socialism.

As you know Cuba has progressed a lot regarding all the indicators of social development and those rates can be compared favorably with the first world in several aspects. We think that without the heavy burden of the blockade that we can move forward a lot more in building prosperous and sustainable socialism to which we aspire.

... If Mr. Kennedy does not like Socialism, we do not like imperialism. We do not like Capitalism.