SOCIALISM QUOTES V

quotations about socialism

Socialism is also unselfishness embraced as an axiom.

ROGER KIMBALL

The New Criterion


A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.

TERRY EAGLETON

Ideology: An Introduction


The ripeness of society for Socialism is not to be disproved by the number of wrecks and ruins which abound.

JOHN SPARGO

Elements of Socialism


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

ÉMILE DURKHEIM

Le socialisme

Tags: Emile Durkheim


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.

VLADIMIR LENIN

speech at Peasant's Congress in Petrograd, November 27, 1917

Tags: Vladimir Lenin


It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with "I," "me," "mine," that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else's.

ALDOUS HUXLEY

The Perennial Philosophy

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Socialism is a scareword they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years. Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called social security. Socialism is what they called farm price supports. Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance. Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations. Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.

HARRY S. TRUMAN

speech, October 10, 1952

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Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.

KARL MARX

The Communist Manifesto


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

RONALD WRIGHT

America & Americans


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

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Democracy is the road to socialism.

KARL MARX

attributed, Communism

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Our governments told us that socialism was the real enemy, and that we would have freedom, but the foreign powers and corporations were the ones with real freedom, the freedom to take all the wealth generated by our work and our land and gave us only a small percentage of the scraps from the table. Their lust for power and their greed drove them to betray not only us but themselves and the word of their own God. (Open your eyes before you die.)

IMMORTAL TECHNIQUE

"Open Your Eyes"


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


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


If Socialism is a legitimate form of government, why have not the forces of government evolved it? The age of experiment has long since passed. We have had repetition over and over again, but no materialization of Socialism. Government is purely human, and until there is a new creation there will never be anything new in government.

JOHN CALHOUN TUTT

attributed, Why I Am Opposed to Socialism


It wasn't idealism that made me, from the beginning, want a more secure and rational society. It was an intellectual judgement, to which I still hold. When I was young its name was socialism. We can be deflected by names. But the need was absolute, and is still absolute.

RAYMOND WILLIAMS

Loyalties

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All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.

BIBLE

Acts 2:44-45

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The supreme principle of socialism is that man takes precedence over things, life over property, and hence, work over capital; that power follows creation, and not possession; that man must not be governed by circumstances, but circumstances must be governed by man.

ERICH FROMM

On Disobedience: Why Freedom Means Saying No to Power

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But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing towards a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because they have tried Socialism and found it nice, but because they have tried Individualism and found it nasty.

G. K. CHESTERTON

Alarms and Discursions

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Real socialism is inside man. It wasn't born with Marx. It was in the communes of Italy in the Middle Ages. You can't say it is finished.

DARIO FO

London Times, April 6, 1992

Tags: Dario Fo