Socialism Quotes

“The socialism of our day has done good service in setting men to thinking how certain civilizing benefits, now only enjoyed by theopulent, can be enjoyed by all.”

“No socialist government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp or violently worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanly directed in the first instance.”

“It is not alone that property, in all its forms, is struck at, but that liberty, in all its forms, is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of socialism.”

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

“Socialism is an attack on the right to breathe freely. No socialist system can be established without a political police.”

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”

“The American Constitution declares 'All men are born equal.' The British Socialist Party add: 'All men must be kept equal'.”

“The main vice of capitalism is the uneven distribution of prosperity. The main vice of socialism is the even distribution of misery.”

“It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice; I consider the real vice is making losses.”

“We ought to regard ourselves and to act as socialists--believers in the wholesomeness and beneficence of the body politic.”

“Socialism would gather all power tothe supreme party and party leaders,rising like stately pinnaclesabove their vast bureaucracies ofcivil servants no longer servants, no longer civil.”

“Christopher Columbus was the first socialist: he didn't know where he was going, he didn?t know where he was? and he did it all at taxpayers expense.”

“In fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same. They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members. Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals. Limits of wisdom and convenience to the public control there may be: limits of principle there are, upon strict analysis, none.”

“Socialism is like a dream. Sooner or later you wake up to reality.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”

“The strongest argument for socialism is that it sounds good. The strongest argument against socialism is that it doesn't work. But those who live by words will always have a soft spot in their hearts for socialism because it sounds so good.”

“We're not a socialist country, because the socialists believe in government ownership in the means of production, but the fascists believe that the government should have private ownership and the politicians should tell people how to run the businesses. So that's the route we seem to be going.”

“We can just as little afford to follow the doctrinaires of an extreme individualism as the doctrinaires of an extreme socialism.”

“There are many well-meaning people today who work at placing an economic floor beneath all of us so that no one shall exist below a certain level or standard of living, and certainly we don't quarrel with this. But look more closely and you may find that all too often these well-meaning people are building a ceiling above which no one shall be permitted to climb and between the two are pressing us all into conformity, into a mold of standardized mediocrity.”

“[Write to your congressional representative against the health care reform proposal or] we will awake to find that we have socialism.”

“Socialists ignore the side of man that is the spirit. They can provide you shelter, fill your belly with bacon and beans, treat you when you're ill, all the things guaranteed to a prisoner or a slave. They don't understand that we also dream.”

“I am a socialist not because I think it is a perfect system, but half a loaf is better than no bread. The other system has been tried and found wanting”

“All systems are capitalist. It's just a matter of who owns and controls the capital -- ancient king, dictator, or private individual. We should properly be looking at the contrast between a free market system where individuals have the right to live like kings if they have the ability to earn that right and government control of the market system such as we find today in socialist nations.”