quotations about socialism
I pass the test that says a man who isn't a socialist at 20 has no heart, and a man who is a socialist at 40 has no head.
WILLIAM CASEY
attributed, Washington Post, May 7, 1987
We comes from God, I from the Devil.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
We are socialists because we reject an international economic order sustained by private profit, alienated labor, race and gender discrimination, environmental destruction, and brutality and violence in defense of the status quo.
DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS OF AMERICA
official website
In socialism of the future ... what counts is the whole, the community of the Volk. The individual and his life play only a subsidiary role. He can be sacrificed--he is prepared to sacrifice himself should the whole demand it.
ADOLF HITLER
attributed, Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant
A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.
LUDWIG VON MISES
Human Action
I believe Socialism is the grandest theory ever presented, and I am sure it will someday rule the world. Then we will have attained the Millennium.... Then men will be content to work for the general welfare and share their riches with their neighbors.
ANDREW CARNAGIE
"A Millionaire Socialist", New York Times, January 1, 1885
Socialism annihilates family life, for instance. With the abolition of private property, marriage in its present form must disappear. This is part of the programme. Individualism accepts this and makes it fine. It converts the abolition of legal restraint into a form of freedom that will help the full development of personality, and make the love of man and woman more wonderful, more beautiful, and more ennobling.
OSCAR WILDE
"The Soul of Man Under Socialism", The Essays of Oscar Wilde
For billions of people throughout the optimistically styled "developing world," socialism is a dreary reality. Such countries mostly adopted socialism before accruing capital for socialists to squander, and as a result, socialism has kept them in permanent impoverishment.
CHARLES SCALIGER
"The Fruits of Socialism", The New American, August 14, 2017
Socialism is also unselfishness embraced as an axiom.
ROGER KIMBALL
The New Criterion
Great Socialist statesmen aren't made, they're stillborn.
SAKI
The Unbearable Bassington
In seeking greater justice and equality in economic conditions, Socialism rests on a strong moral basis; but in seeking no more than greater material ease and comfort, it betrays the presence of mortality.
FRANKLIN VERZELIUS NEWTON PAINTER
attributed, Why I Am Opposed to Socialism
Socialism is not feasible. It is a myth of dreamy minds. It has an idealistic atmosphere and is attractive to those who lag in the struggle of life. Its worst feature is that it deceives the people who conscientiously seek relief in it. Its leadership thrives because its impracticability prevents the experimental tests that would expose its sophistry.
JOHN CALHOUN TUTT
attributed, Why I Am Opposed to Socialism
I am opposed to Socialism because I believe that it attempts to do by legislative enactment, what must come through an evolutionary process. I believe that we are now ready for a long evolutionary jump, but not so far forward as some of our Socialist brethren would like to jump. I desire to go as far toward human justice and good will toward men, as anyone, but I do not feel that we should start and stop, because we are not ready to go the whole distance. I would start and go but one day's journey at a time.
WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE
attributed, Why I Am Opposed to Socialism
Socialists cry "Power to the people", and raise the clenched fist as they say it. We all know what they really mean--power over people, power to the State.
MARGARET THATCHER
speech to Conservative Central Council, March 15, 1986
I am a Socialist not through reading a textbook that has caught my intellectual fancy, nor through unthinking tradition, but because I believe that, at its best, Socialism corresponds most closely to an existence that is both rational and moral. It stands for co-operation, not confrontation; for fellowship, not fear. It stands for equality, not because it wants people to be the same but because only through equality in our economic circumstances can our individuality develop properly.
TONY BLAIR
maiden speech as MP for Sedgefield, July 6, 1983
I believe that for the past twenty years there has been a creeping socialism spreading in the United States.
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
speech to Republican leaders in Custer State Park, South Dakota, June 11, 1953
Socialism, hypnotism, patriotism, materialism.
Fools making laws for the breaking of jaws
And the sound of the keys as they clink
But there's no time to think.
BOB DYLAN
"No Time to Think"
Well I came across Marx rather late in life actually, and when I read him, two things: first of all I realised that he'd come to the conclusion about capitalism which I'd come to much later, and I was a bit angry he'd thought of it first; and secondly, I see Marx who was an old Jew, as the last of the Old Testament Prophets, this old bearded man working in the British Library, studying capitalism, that's what 'Das Kapital' was about, it was an explanation of British capitalism. And I thought to myself, 'Well anyone could write a book like that, but what infuses, what comes out of his writing, is the passionate hostility to the injustice of capitalism. He was a Prophet, and so I put him in that category as an Old Testament Prophet.
TONY BENN
interview with John Cleary, February 23, 2003
In my opinion, nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country.
GEORGE ORWELL
preface to the Ukrainian edition, Animal Farm
While it's clear that young people increasingly view socialism in a positive light, it's also clear that many of them are uneducated about what it entails, or the impact it's had throughout history.
CABOT PHILLIPS
"Students love socialism!... whatever that is", Campus Reform, July 16, 2017