Quotessence
Home / Topics / Socialism Quotes

Socialism Quotes

Browse 1611 quotes about Socialism.

Related topics

CapitalismPeopleCommunismStatesIfsGovernmentEconomicWorldDemocracyPoliticalMeanMenEugenicsCountryThinkingWayEconomyPoliticsLibertyHumansPartyHas BeensSocialEconomicsIndividualLiberalismClassShouldDoeFirstsWantCapitalistIdeasLibertarianBelieveKnowsYearsDemocraticFormNeedsProblemRevolutionWarCommunistFactsFascismMayPhilosophyCapitalism And SocialismMassProductionsTodayWholeAmericaChristianityInterestPropertyReasonCareForceHistoricalKindMarxismRichPrinciplesTryingWealthWelfareWellsLeftLongOrderRealRunningStillsTwoWould BeCertainEnterpriseGivingLibertarianismMatterRevolutionarySaidStruggleUseCommunism And SocialismCoursesDifferencesFightingGermanyIdeologyIndividualismMovementNationsOwnershipPolicyPoorResultsSharemore

Socialism Quotes

“So, if capitalism is not really the root of the problem socialist societies share with late capitalist societies, there must be some­thing else, something shared in common. And that, it would seem to me, is industrialism. That, and the peculiar social forms gener­ated by the industrial process itself. Centralization is a dynamic shared, of necessity, by any industrial/industrializing society. Rationalization is another factor...assembly­ line workers are alienated [not] so much by the abstract notion of their "distancing" from their "product" or "profit" so much as they are alienated by the sheer physical misery of being trapped in a factory.”

CapitalismSocialismIndigenous WisdomIndustrialism
Author:Frank Black Elk
Create image

“The socialist’s desire to forcefully submerge and drown the individual under the prerogative of the collective is a perverted ethos that has led to incalculable misery. That socialists are somehow numb to the reality of their violent history serves to explain how they personally coped with the carnage when they were confronted with the product of their efforts.”

SocialismCommunismGenocideIndividualismCollectivismIndividual LibertyMass MurderSocialists20th Century HistoryHolomodor
Author:A.E. Samaan
Create image

“So if the ending of apartheid is now universally agreed to be a good thing, and Cuba played such a central role, how is it still possible to have such differing views of Castro and Mandela and of Cuba and South Africa? The short answer is that the mainstream media has been so successful in distorting basic historical facts that many are so blinded by Cold War hangovers that they are entirely incapable of critical thought, but the other answer is rather more Machiavellian. The reality is that apartheid did not die, and thus the reason so many white conservatives now love Mandela is essentially that he let their cronies "get away with it". The hypocritical worship of black freedom fighters once they are no longer seen to pose a danger or are safely dead - Martin Luther King might be the best example of this - is one of the key ways of maintaining a liberal veneer over what in reality is brutal intent.”

PoliticsRacismSocialismSouth AfricaCubaApartheidCastroFreedom FightersMadela
Book:Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire
Create image

“It is with excellence that we'll revolutionize our world, not with success. Look at all those successful people - not a single concern for the downtrodden - not a single act of genuine compassion for those who have nothing - if this is success, then let me remain unsuccessful the rest of my life while struggling to elevate my society.”

SuccessCapitalismExcellenceGreedSocialismService Of HumanityAccountabilitySocial ResponsibilitySelf ObsessionReformist
Book:Gente Mente Adelante: Prejudice Conquered is World Conquered
Create image

“Like a gloomy and sinister paradox since its apparition until now, socialism suffered terrible and terrifying metamorphoses. With the name of the most human doctrine—Socialism—the most ominous and naughty crimes against humanity were done. The National Socialism of Hitler created Auschwitz and Majdanek and the People’s socialism of Stalin — Gulag and Kolima! And both of them buried more than fifty million people! That’s monstrous!”

SocialismSovereigntyMonopolyNon FictionUpper ClassUssrLower ClassSocial EqualityPolitical PrinciplesPlanned Capitalism
Book:Socialism Is Dead! Long Live Socialism!: The Marx Code-Socialism with a Human Face
Create image

“In a free society there is always pressure to change it and make people less free. Leaders either move to the right with fascism or move to the left with socialism. In both cases, these movements meet at a dystopian place called collectivism. Ultimately it is about subjugation and taking away individual rights, liberties and freedoms and handing them to an elite few.”

IndividualLeftRightsSocialismFascismRightDystopianFree SocietyCollectivismLiberties
Book:Distilled Thoughts
Create image

“After Germany's collapse in 1918 Jewry became very powerful in Germany in all spheres of life, especially in the political, general intellectual and cultural, and, most particularly, the economic spheres. The men came back from the front, had nothing to look forward to, and found a large number of Jews who had come in during the war from Poland and the East, holding positions, particularly economic positions. It is known that, under the influence of the war and business concerned with it -- demobilization, which offered great possibilities for doing business, inflation, deflation -- enormous shifts and transfers took place in the propertied classes. There were many Jews who did not show the necessary restraint and who stood out more and more in public life, so that they actually invited certain comparisons because of their numbers and the position they controlled in contrast to the German people. In addition there was the fact that particularly those parties which were avoided by nationally minded people also had Jewish leadership out of proportion to the total number of Jews. That did not apply only to Germany, but also to Austria, which we have always considered a part of Germany. There the entire Social Democratic leadership was almost exclusively in Jewish hands. They played a very considerable part in politics, particularly in the left-wing parties, and they also became very prominent in the press in all political directions. (14 March 1946)”

SocialismCommunismNationalismJewsAntisemitismSocial DemocracyNational SocialismThird ReichNuremberg Trials
Book:Trial of the Major war Criminals: before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November 1945-1 October 1946
Create image

“Meanwhile, two other great currents in political thought, had a decisive significance on the development of socialist ideas: Liberalism, which had powerfully stimulated advanced minds in the Anglo-Saxon countries, Holland and Spain in particular, and Democracy in the sense. to which Rousseau gave expression in his Social Contract, and which found its most influential representatives in the leaders of French Jacobinism. While Liberalism in its social theories started off from the individual and wished to limit the state's activities to a minimum, Democracy took its stand on an abstract collective concept, Rousseau's general will, which it sought to fix in the national state. Liberalism and Democracy were pre-eminently political concepts, and since most of the original adherents of both did scarcely consider the economic conditions of society, the further development of these conditions could not be practically reconciled with the original principles of Democracy, and still less with those of Liberalism. Democracy with its motto of equality of all citizens before the law, and Liberalism with its right of man over his own person, both were wrecked on the realities of capitalist economy. As long as millions of human beings in every country have to sell their labour to a small minority of owners, and sink into the most wretched misery if they can find no buyers, the so-called equality before the law remains merely a pious fraud, since the laws are made by those who find themselves in possession of the social wealth. But in the same way there can be no talk of a right over one's own person, for that right ends when one is compelled to submit to the economic dictation of another if one does not want to starve.”

DemocracySocialismLiberalismAnarchismLibertarian SocialismRockerRudolf
Book:Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism
Create image

“It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags and with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said 'Señor' or 'Don' or even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' or 'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos días'. Tipping had been forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and from, the loud-speakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in this that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for...so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low; you saw very few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars except the gypsies. Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.”

CapitalismLibertarianSocialismAnarchismLibertarian SocialismAnarcho Syndicalism
Book:Homage to Catalonia
Create image

“I am a convinced advocate of economic and social equality because I know that, without it, liberty, justice, human dignity, morality, and the well-being of individuals, as well as the prosperity of nations, will never amount to more than a pack of lies. But since I stand for liberty as the primary condition of mankind, I believe that equality must be established in the world by the spontaneous organization of labor and the collective ownership of property by freely organized producers' associations, and by the equally spontaneous federation of communes, to replace the domineering paternalistic State.”

FreedomEqualityLibertarianSocialismLibertarian Socialism
Author:Mikhail Bakunin
Create image

“The anarchists cannot consider, like the collectivists, that a remuneration which would be proportionate to the hours of labour spent by each person in the production of riches may be an ideal, or even an approach to an ideal, society. Without entering here into a discussion as to how far the exchange value of each merchandise is really measured now by the amount of labour necessary for its production—a separate study must be devoted to the subject—we must say that the collectivist ideal seems to us merely unrealizable in a society which has been brought to consider the necessaries for production as a common property. Such a society would be compelled to abandon the wage-system altogether. It appears impossible that the mitigated individualism of the collectivist school could co-exist with the partial communism implied by holding land and machinery in common—unless imposed by a powerful government, much more powerful than all those of our own times. The present wage-system has grown up from the appropriation of the necessaries for production by the few; it was a necessary condition for the growth of the present capitalist production; and it cannot outlive it, even if an attempt be made to pay to the worker the full value of his produce, and hours-of-labour-checks be substituted for money. Common possession of the necessaries for production implies the common enjoyment of the fruits of the common production; and we consider that an equitable organization of society can only arise when every wage-system is abandoned, and when everybody, contributing for the common well-being to the full extent of his capacities, shall enjoy also from the common stock of society to the fullest possible extent of his needs.”

SocialismAnarchismLibertarian SocialismAnarcho CommunismAnarcho Collectivism
Book:Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings
Create image

“As far as socialism, I used to think I was fundamentally opposed to it, but eventually came to realize that wasn't really true, and that what I actually oppose is aggression. Voluntary socialism can be a wonderful way of living for small groups, and most people practice some form of it in their families. Only when imposed on people by force does socialism become evil. One of the beautiful things about a libertarian society is that people could still create socialist communes and be left alone to redistribute resources within them to their hearts' content, so long as no one is forced to join or prevented from leaving. This stands in stark contrast to a state-socialist society, which cannot similarly tolerate peaceful acts of capitalism among consenting participants.”

CapitalismLibertarianSocialismAggressionConsentChanging Your MindLibertarian SocialismState SocialismLibertarian SocietyVoluntary Socialism
Author:Starchild
Create image

“In the morning I inspected my traveling companions and found a youth and a handsome old man with a wisp of gray beard sitting opposite me, sipping bitter tea. Presently the youth spoke to me, in formalities at first, and then inevitably of politics. I discovered that his wife’s uncle was a railway official and that he was traveling with a pass. He was on his way back to Szechuan, his native province, which he had left seven years before. But he was not sure that he would be able to visit his home town after all. Bandits were reported to be operating near there. “You mean Reds?” “Oh, no, not Reds, although there are Reds in Szechuan, too. No, I mean bandits.” “But aren’t the Reds also bandits?” I asked out of curiosity. “The newspapers always call them Red bandits or Communist bandits.” “Ah, but you must know that the editors must call them bandits because they are ordered to do so by Nanking,” he explained. “If they called them Communists or revolutionaries that would prove they were Communists themselves.” “But in Szechuan don’t people fear the Reds as much as the bandits?” “Well, that depends. The rich men fear them, and the landlords, and the officials and tax collectors, yes. But the peasants do not fear them. Sometimes they welcome them.” Then he glanced apprehensively at the old man, who sat listening intently, and yet seeming not to listen. “You see,” he continued, “the peasants are too ignorant to understand that the Reds only want to use them. They think the Reds really mean what they say.” “But they don’t mean it?” “My father wrote to me that they did abolish usury and opium in the Sungpan [Szechuan], and that they redistributed the land there. So you see they are not exactly bandits. They have principles, all right. But they are wicked men. They kill too many people.” Then surprisingly the graybeard lifted his gentle face and with perfect composure made an astonishing remark. “Sha pu kou!” he said. “They don’t kill enough!” We both looked at him flabbergasted. Unfortunately the train was nearing Chengchow, where I had to transfer to the Lunghai line, and I was obliged to break off the discussion. But I have ever since wondered with what deadly evidence this Confucian-looking old gentleman would have supported his startling contention. I wondered about it all the next day of travel, as we climbed slowly through the weird levels of loess hills in Honan and Shensi, and until my train—this one still new and very comfortable—rolled up to the new and handsome railway station at Sianfu.”

SocialismCommunismChinese RevolutionCommunist China
Author:Edgar Snow
Create image

“In exchange for hard work the [Cuban] people have freedom. Not only freedom from want but freedom to develop themselves as individuals. They have shelter, no mortgages, sufficient food for survival and sufficient clothing. There are few cars, as this is really a luxury item, and what cars there are, are for the use of the people. There are many buses. These buses are all made in France or England. In Havana, transportation is only 5 cents. If you have it, you pay it consciously, if not you can ride anyway. I used to watch the people get on and everyone seemed to pay. Public telephones are free. Medical care is completely free to everyone. Even sports events are free. (1969)”

FreedomSocialismCubaHavana
Book:Enriqueta Vasquez And the Chicano Movement: Writings from El Grito Del Norte (Hispanic Civil Rights)
Create image

“Creative activity at the grassroots is the basic factor of the new public life. Let the workers set up workers' control at their factories. Let them supply the villages with manufactures in exchange for grain […] Socialism cannot be decreed from above. Its spirit rejects the mechanical bureaucratic approach: living creative socialism is the product of the masses themselves.”

SocialismCommunismGrassrootsSovietsWorkers CouncilsEarly Soviet Russia
Book:Collected Works, Volume 26: September 1917-February 1918
Create image

“There would have to be fast work to ward off disaster. Far-sighted people, North and South, even foresaw the laboring people soon forsaking both of the old parties and going Socialist. Politicians and business men shuddered at the thought of such a tragedy and saw horrible visions of old-age pensions, eight-hour laws, unemployment insurance, workingmen's compensation, minimum-wage legislation, abolition of child labor, dissemination of birth-control information, monthly vacations for female workers, two-month vacations for prospective mothers, both with pay, and the probable killing of individual initiative and incentive by taking the ownership of national capital out of the hands of two million people and putting it into the hands of one hundred and twenty million.”

DemocracyLaborSocialismLaborersSocial Safety Net
Book:Black No More
Create image

“…The story of the Pledge of Allegiance and its National Socialist roots is a fascinating one. Dr. Rex Curry, a passionate libertarian, has made the issue his white whale.”

SocialismCommunismPatriotismNationalismLibertarianismNazismPledge Of AllegianceRex Curry
Book:Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
Create image

“A virulent form of utopianism has indeed afflicted the modern age, but its name is not Marxism. It is the crazed motion that a single global system known as the free market can impose itself on the most diverse cultures and economies and cure all their ills. The purveyors of this totalitarian fantasy are not to be found hiding scar-faced and sinisterly soft-spoken in underground bunkers like James Bond villains. They are to be seen dining at upmarket Washington restaurants and strolling on Sussex estates.”

CapitalismSocialismCommunismMarxismUtopiaUtopianism
Book:Why Marx Was Right
Create image

“In the name of "class struggle" and "the unified interest of the working class," the Left has always selected certain sectors of the working class as revolutionary subjects and condemned others to a merely supportive role in the struggles these sectors were waging.”

FeminismSocialismWorking ClassSocialist FeminismFeminist Socialism
Book:Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle
Create image

“At Hongguang Commune, a roadside area of more than 2,000 mu was cleared of more than 180 dwellings. At least 12,000 homes were dismantled throughout the county. Unrelated families were obliged to share quarters, sometimes with domestic fowl. Cadres burst into homes without notice, tossed out belongings, and reduced a house to rubble in an instant. Commune members returning from deployment elsewhere wept upon finding their homes, wives, and children gone. Some families relocated seven times in a year. Cadres ransacked homes, often snatching desirable goods. Some commune members retaliated by hiding snakes in their rice jars.”

ChinaSocialismCommunismMarxismMao ZedongMaoismLeninismGreat FamineRed China
Book:Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962
Create image

“Mao Tsetung's grasp of the future, his vision of man's true role on earth, has given him a place as a world figure. His creative genius has come from his constant return to the people, resisting all attempts to elevate himself above them. Much has been said about the "personality cult"; I have seen true, genuine love and admiration from the ordinary people of China for Mao Tsetung. The personality cult evolved round him by city bureaucrats he has done his best to put down, withdrawing himself as a person, giving to the people all homage for the Revolution. It is in this spirit, not elevating Mao as a genius, but showing him as a man, in a constant search for truth, for reality, that this book has been written.”

ChinaSocialismCommunismBiographyMao ZedongMaoism
Author:Han Suyin
Create image

“I am a degenerate modern semi-intellectual who would die if I did not get my early morning cup of tea and my New Statesman every Friday. Clearly I do not, in a sense, 'want' to return to a simpler, harder, probably agricultural way of life. In the same sense I don't 'want' to cut down on my drinking, to pay my debts, to take enough exercise, to be faithful to my wife, etc. etc. But in another and more permanent sense I do want these things, and perhaps in the same sense I want a civilization in which 'progress' is not definable as making the world safe for little fat men.”

SocialismPierWitan
Book:The Road to Wigan Pier
Create image

“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give. The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. We contend that for a nation to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle. The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.”

WarEvilFreedomCourageCapitalismGoodSocialismManichean
Author:Sir Winston Churchill
Create image

“Did they know what Communism, “Bolshevism,” was? They did not; not my friends. Except for Herr Kessler, Teacher Hildebrandt, and young Horstmar Rupprecht (after he entered the university, in 1941), they knew Bolshevism as a specter which, as it took on body in their imaginings, embraced not only the Communists but the Social Democrats, the trade-unions, and, of course, the Jews, the gypsies, the neighbor next door whose dog had bit them, and his dog; the bundled root cause of all their past, present, and possible tribulations.”

TrumpSocialismRight WingParanoiaRepublicansMagaBoogeymanUseful IdiotsCommunism Cultural Marxism
Book:They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45
Create image

“War can condition a person to be resilient, tolerant, dependable, strong, and capable of so much more than one who had experienced nothing of it; it can bring out the very best in us, but also the very worst. Where is it, I ask, the proper conduit through which a soldier should be raised from whence they would become an upstanding citizen of the world, instead of a single country?”

WorldWarCountryChristianReligionStrongPeaceCompassionTrainingForgivenessExperienceIslamSoldierToleranceSocialismBuddhistCommunismDependenceHumanitarianismRapeMuslimResilientSoftCitizenDalai LamaTolerantThe Pope
Author:Mike Norton
Create image

“It was so incomprehensible how a man could fail to see it. Here were all the opportunities of the country, the land and the buildings upon the land, the railroads, the mines, the factories, and the stores. All in the hands of a few private individuals, called capitalists, for whom the people were obliged to work, for wages. The whole balance of what the people produced went to heap up the fortunes of these capitalists. To heap, and heap again, and yet again. And that, in spite of the fact that they and everyone about them lived in unthinkable luxury. And was it not plain that if the people cut off the share of those who merely owned, the share of those who worked would be much greater? That was as plain as two and two makes four, and that was the whole of it. Absolutely, the whole of it. And yet, there were people who could not see it. Who would argue about everything else in the world. They would tell you that governments could not mange things as economically as private individuals. They would repeat and repeat that and think they were saying something. They could not see that economical management by masters, meant simply that they, the people, were worked harder, and ground closer, and paid less. They were wage owners and servants at the mercy of exploiters, whose one thought was to get as much out of them as possible.”

HistoryCapitalismSocial JusticeSocialism20th CenturyAmericanImmigrant ExperienceThe JungleMuckraking
Book:The Jungle
Create image

“The Soviet Union in American accounts tends to be a deprived, and depraved, hell, but there was also much that was sweet, and sheltered, about it, and this book’s portrayal of that country touches the bone for an exile. So does the novel’s evocation of that subtle Soviet sense of living with eyes and ears everywhere; of how sinners find crumbs even at a table set for the new saints of socialism; and of the integrity that survives, miraculously, even in such circumstances. So that the Muscovites mocked in the early part of the book receive, as well, a kind of hidden sympathy. No human being deserves the trauma of a life in a place like the USSR, and that person’s ultimate judgment must take that into account.”

TraumaSocialismCommunismSoviet UnionRefugeesUssrExpatriatesExilesRussion
Book:The Master and Margarita
Create image

“Socialists seem to think George Orwell’s 1984 is a suggestion, or at least are unashamed of mimicking the methods of the totalitarian state Orwell depicted. Libertarians know it to be a warning, and a government that micro-manages all aspects of humanity an intolerable reality.”

FreedomLibertyLibertarianSocialismCommunismLibertarianismSocialistTotalitarianismCollectivismLibertarian PartyDemocratic SocialismTotalitarianUtopian SocialismSocialistsUtopian SocietyCollectivistsUtopian SocialistDemocratic Socialists
Author:A.E. Samaan
Create image

“What is peculiar and novel to our age is that the principal goal of politics in every advanced society is not, strictly speaking, a political one, that is today, it is not concerned with human beings as persons and citizens, but with human bodies. ... In all technologically advanced countries today, whatever political label they give themselves, their policies have, essentially, the same goal: to guarantee to every member of society, as a psychophysical organism, the right to physical and mental health.”

FreedomResponsibilityLibertyRightsDoctorsMedicineLibertarianSocialismHealth CareTaxationPsychiatryViolationCoercionSystemCollectivismStatismLaissez FaireSocialized MedicineFree MarketsNanny State
Author:W.H. Auden
Create image