Socialism Quotes

It may well be that there will be this socialism, Juliana,’ she said, ‘but I can tell you right now that no amount of socialism will make my madam was her own underwear.’ - ‘Aunt Juliana’s Indian

~ Petina Gappah

Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to a man himself.

~ Karl Marx

Son, it’s easy tae be guid oan a fu’ belly. It’s when a man’s goat two bites an’ wan o’ them he’ll share, ye ken whit he’s made o’. Listen. In ony country in the world, who are the only folk that ken whit it’s like tae leeve in that country? The folk at the boattom. The rest can a’ kid themselves oan. They can afford to hiv fancy ideas. We canny, son. We loass the wan idea o’ who we are, we’re deid. We’re wan anither. Tae survive, we’ll respect wan anither. When the time comes, we’ll a’ move forward thegither, or nut at all.

~ William Mcilvanney

It is from the death of the social that socialism will emerge, as it is from the death of God that religions emerge.

~ Jean Baudrillard

Were the ironies of taxation any better: raising money for schools and hospitals and roads and bridges, and spending it on blowing up schools and hospitals and roads and bridges in self-defeating wars?

~ Edward St. Aubyn

You won't mind my calling you Comrade, will you? I've just become a socialist. It's a great scheme. You ought to be one. You work for the equal distribution of property, and start by collaring all you can and sitting on it.

~ P.g. Wodehouse

Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves.

~ John Steinbeck

That’s precisely what the governing body should NOT do—manage every detail of their lives. We are not their meddling grandmothers; we exist to keep them safe so they can make their own decisions, resolve their own problems, and live their own lives as their conscience dictates. We are NOT to become that conscience.

~ Trish Mercer

If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. when the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did net avert the child's death or her own; but it seemed natural to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use against bullets than a sheet of paper. The terrible thing that the party has done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of history.

~ George Orwell

History's shown that in this world, when you take your ideals too far, all you ever create is Hell.

~ Ken Akamatsu

Remember this moment when you first realized that the government can’t properly take care of people. In fact, that’s never been their responsibility. They’re supposed to keep our borders safe so that we can live as we wish. It’s our responsibility—yours and mine and Zenos’s and everyone else’s—to take care of each other.

~ Trish Mercer

We can overcome division only by refusing to be divided.

~ Raymond Williams

She was convinced the country was about to succumb to revolutionary socialism. Her own circumstances encouraged this belief: just on the edge of the really rich country set, she shared their views and opinions but lacked the financial and architechtural insulation from real or imagined political troubles. She found crushed larger cans and cigarette packets in her front garden and interpreted these as menacing signals from the Perthshire proletariat. Every flicker and dim of electric light was a portent of class war.

~ James Robertson

One person cannot make up for the evils of a whole system and it is the system that is to blame - the system of narrowness and of pride, and of exclusiveness, and of no one doing anything for another, unless there is something to be gained in return.

~ Amy Dillwyn

There is only one hope for mankind - and that is democratic socialism. There is only one party in Great Britain which can do it - and that is the Labour Party.

~ Aneurin Bevan

Back then, I think, both sides were just very young. They needed to grow up enough to realize that thing get quite complicated in the business of living, that a lot of things require mutual understanding and compromise. I mean, when you get right down to it, all business for us men on earth is based on material things - so we've just got to work hard and share the fruits of our labors with one another. Only when that is done righteously can we render our faith honorably to God. Within a generation of adopting a school of thought in the name of New Learning, be it Christianity or socialism, we all became such ardent followers that we forgot the way of life we'd led for so long. (2007: 163)

~ Hwang Sok-Yong

The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses.

~ Oscar Wilde

My dear, it is very nice here, every day two or three persons are stabbed by soldiers in the city; there are daily arrests, but apart from these it is pretty gay..

~ Rosa Luxemburg

Both Marx and Nietzsche understood that moral outrage is the last resort of the powerless. That is why Marx refused to issue moral condemnations of capitalism, preferring instead to lay out, calmly and ruthlessly, his reasons for believing that it is destined to be replaced by socialism. And that is why Nietzsche mocks Christianity for portraying its crucified Saviour as bait wriggling on a hook to catch unsuspecting souls.

~ Robert Paul Wolff

They had long ago found out that one could not be an owner unless one were cold.

~ John Steinbeck

We disapprove of state education. Than the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Than the socialists say that we don't want an religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Than they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.

~ Frédéric Bastiat

Nationalism and socialism as actually lived and applied in the 20th century are the same thing (and in the 18th and 19th century, nationalism was often a force for classical liberalism!). It’s all a kind of reactionary tribalism (another “ism” which becomes poisonous quickly as you up the dosage). When you nationalize an industry, you socialize it. When you socialize an industry you nationalize it. Yes, international socialism rejected this formulation. And that’s why international socialism failed! People wanted to be Germans or Russians or Italians and they wanted to be socialists. Even the Soviet Union embraced national-socialism (socialism in one country) because that 'workers of the world unite' crap wouldn't fly. After Stalin, no Communist or socialist regime failed to exploit nationalism to one extent or another.

~ Jonah Goldberg

the elite use socialism as a consolidation and control mechanism. Allen describes Socialism as a movement created, manipulated and used by power-seeking billionaires in order to gain control over the world. He points out that this is accomplished, first by establishing socialist governments in the various nations and then combining them all under the United Nations. Socialism, in practice, is tyranny. It is control by the wealthy individuals who control the state. It is always oppressive, because they must use terror of some kind to create restrictive laws which ensure their control.

~ Mark M. Rich

The first premises of the Party...were two rooms above a corner junk shop, up two flights of rickety stairs. 'One felt' said a veteran member forty five years later in the Socialist Standard, that one was entering 'the heart of deep red revolution'.

~ Robert Barltrop

A socialist must be 'class-conscious', recognizing his identity as a member of the working class and understanding his interests as permanently against those of the master class.

~ Robert Barltrop

Seeking social equality for disabilities doesn't come from bullying or militancy, seeking social equality for disabilities comes is from realising the open-mindedness and acknowledgement of each person's reality

~ Paul Isaacs

The Party's Object...' The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interests of the whole community'......was precise and legalistic. Correctness of definition and theory was all-important: in the minds of the men of new party, the failures of the existing organisations were simply the fruits of false theories. For the same reason, the Object did not mention the means of exchange. It was held that socialism, with free access to everything, there would be no exchange of goods; hence, to talk of the common ownership of the means of exchange was to show misunderstanding from the start.

~ Robert Barltrop

Everything is subjective.

~ Douglas Hsieh

Let the Unions become engines for the working people to right their wrongs. Not benefit societies, or burial clubs. Let the Unions become civilian regiments to fight in the cause of the people.

~ Richard Llewellyn

Marxian Socialism and Bolshevism are two historical phenomena which have hardly a single common denominator.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

Yeah, it always amazes me how quickly people turn into good little socialists when they run out of their stuff. As long as they have something, it's theirs. Let them run out, and you need to share.

~ A. American

Allen agreed, writing, If one understands that socialism is not a share-the-wealth program, but is in reality a method to consolidate and control the wealth, then the seeming paradox of super-rich men promoting socialism becomes no paradox at all. Instead it becomes the logical, even the perfect tool of the power-seeking megalomaniacs. He reveals, Socialism, is not a movement of the downtrodden masses, but of the economic elite.

~ Mark M. Rich

In 1987 Senator Jesse Helms, stated it is no secret that the international bankers profiteer form sovereign state debt. The New York banks have found important profit centers in lending to countries plunged into debt by Socialist regimes. Under Socialist regimes, countries go deeper and deeper into debt because Socialism as an economic system does not work. International bankers are sophisticated enough to understand this phenomenon and they are sophisticated enough to profit from it.

~ Mark M. Rich

The quest to remove all inequality is the deadening hand of socialism and results in social stagnation.

~ Cory Bernardi

For the Right, strikes are both devilish and pathetic, have both terrible and absolutely no effects.

~ China Miéville

The most visible and often tragic sacrifice of proletarian socialism - not to mention internationalism - on the altar of nationalism, of course, has been by the states that proclaim themselves to be, or to aspire to become, socialist.

~ André Gunder Frank

Socialists try to convince us that the tea becomes sweet not because of sugar, but because of mixing.

~ Janusz Korwin-Mikke

You will never find peace with these fascistsYou'll never find friends such as weSo remember that valley of JaramaAnd the people that'll set that valley free.From this valley they say we are goingDo not hasten to bid us adieu Even though we lost the battle at JaramaWe'll set this valley before we're through.All this world is like this valley called JaramaSo green and so bright and so fairNo fascists can dwell in our valleyNor breathe in our new freedoms air.

~ Woody Guthrie

I want to say that further you are not a great chief of this country. That you have no following, no power, no control. Logan continued, You are on an Indian reservation merely at the sufferance of the government. You are fed by the government, clothed by the government, your children are educated by the government, and all you have and are today is because of the government. If it were not for the government you would be freezing and starving today in the mountains. I merely say these things to notify you that you cannot insult the people of the United States of America or its committees ...the government feeds and clothes and educates your children now, and desires to teach you to become farmers, and to civilize you, and make you as white men.-Senator John Logan, 1883

~ Dee Brown