#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.”

“We can't socialize the doctors without socializing the patients.”

“There are those, of course, who claim we must give up freedom in exchange for economic progress. Well, pardon me, but anyone trying to sell you that line is no better than a three-card-trick man. One thing becoming more clear every day is that freedom and progress go hand in hand. Throughout the developing world, people are rejecting socialism because they see that it doesn't empower people, it impoverishes them.”

“One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine.”

“Capitalism will always survive, because socialism will be there to save it.”

“Ours is a system of corporate socialism, where companies capitalize their profits and socialize their losses…in effect, they tax you for their accidents, bungling, boondoggles, and mismanagement, just like a government. We should be able to deselect them.”

“If "socialism" is defined as "ownership of the means of production"--and this is both the orthodox and the only rigorous definition--then the United States is the first truly Socialist country.”

“If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first.”

“To make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great thing.”

“The socialistic conception of the West was born in an environment reeking with violence.”

“The socialism that India can assimilate is the socialism of the spinning wheel.”

“I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic.”

“If we are going to achieve a real equality, the U.S. will have to adopt a modified form of Socialism.”

“Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God's children.”

“I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic. And yet I am not so opposed to capitalism that I have failed to see its relative merits. It started out with a noble and high motive, to block the trade monopolies of nobles, but like most human systems it falls victim to the very thing it was revolting against. So today capitalism has outlived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.”

“I call the Conservative Party now to a crusade. Not only the Conservative Party. I appeal to all those men and women of goodwill who do not want a Marxist future for themselves or their children or their children's children. This is not just a fight about national solvency. It is a fight about the very foundations of the social order. It is a crusade not merely to put a temporary brake on Socialism, but to stop its onward march once and for all.”

“Socialists don't like ordinary people choosing, for they might not choose 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.”

“No theory of government was ever given a fairer test or a more prolonged experiment in a democratic country than democratic socialism received in Britain. Yet it was a miserable failure in every respect... To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukemia with leeches.”

“Good Conservatives always pay their bills. And on time. Not like the Socialists who run up other people's bills.”

“Some Socialists seem to believe that people should be numbers in a State computer. We believe they should be individuals. We are all unequal. No one, thank heavens, is like anyone else, however much the Socialists may pretend otherwise. We believe that everyone has the right to be unequal but to us every human being is equally important.”

“Socialism lays an bad egg by killing the capitalism that lays the golden eggs”

“Socialism is in no way a curate's egg”

“Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them.”

“To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukaemia with leeches.”

“The real case against socialism is not its economic inefficiency, though on all sides there is evidence of that. Much more fundamental is its basic immorality.”