Socialism Quotes

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Yesterday, Barbara [Castle] quoted from a speech which I made some years ago, and she said that I believed that Socialism in the context of modern society meant the conquest of the commanding heights of the economy …

One hears murmurs against Mussolini on the ground that he is a desperado: the real objection to him is that he is a politician. Indeed, he is probably the most perfect specimen of the genus politician on view in the world today. His career has been impeccably classical. Beginning life as a ranting Socialist of the worst type, he abjured Socialism the moment he saw better opportunities for himself on the other side, and ever since then he has devoted himself gaudily to clapping Socialists in jail, filling them with castor oil, sending blacklegs to burn down their houses, and otherwise roughing them. Modern politics has produced no more adept practitioner.

I would do my day jobs at various mainstream papers and magazines and TV stations, where my title was 'Christopher Hitchens' and then sneak down to the East End, where I was variously features editor of Socialist Worker and book review editor of the theoretical monthly International Socialism.

Christopher Hitchens

If now, after the collapse, should any of these lackeys of Adolf Hitler have the insolence to claim they were merely harmless onlookers, let them feel the scourge of avenging mankind …. Whoever cries about having lost the Nazi system or wants to resurrect National Socialism is to be treated as a lunatic.

Friedrich Kellner

The 19th century was the age of Individualism the 20th and 21st are the ages of Socialism.

Francis Parker Yockey

This is, in fact, the philosophical defence of progressive socialism, that human progress requires that one after another the lower material animal functions shall be reduced to routine, in order that a larger amount of individual effort may be devoted to the exercise of higher functions and the cultivation by strife of higher qualities.

The idea of restructuring [perestroika]…combines continuity and innovation, the historical experience of Bolshevism and the contemporaneity of socialism.

Mikhail Gorbachev

What I used to respect was not really aristocracy, but a set of personal qualities which aristocracy then developed better than any other system... a set of qualities, however, whose merit lay only in a psychology of non-calculative, non-competitive disinterestedness, truthfulness, courage, and generosity fostered by good education, minimum economic stress, and assumed position, AND JUST AS ACHIEVABLE THROUGH SOCIALISM AS THROUGH ARISTOCRACY.

H. P. Lovecraft

Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then 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

I take a much more pragmatic view than many people on the Left about working with Neil Kinnock. Kinnock represents the best vehicle possible for achieving socialism now.

Ken Livingstone

The optimism of the Left was created and maintained by a strong feeling: admiration for the power of reason, certainty that the application of science to industry would revolutionise the order of human society and the condition of its individual members. The ancestral aspiration towards human brotherhood was united with faith in practical science in order to inspire either nationalism or socialism or both.

Fascism is preoccupied by the clothing (namely the forms of state organization), National-Socialism by the body (namely the racial eugenics), whereas Legionarism is preoccupied by something much deeper: by the soul (namely by its strengthening through the cultivation of Christian virtues and its preparation with final salvation in mind, salvation dealt with by the Christian Church in the most perfect fashion).

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

Fascism recognizes the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which divergent interests are coordinated and harmonized in the unity of the State.

Benito Mussolini

The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses.

... some parties think that only the rules laid down by their doctrines are the right ones. Our strength resides in the fact that our revolution does not desire the triumph of one class or of one ideology over another.... Ours is a White Revolution: we adopt no slogan but we embrace everything which seems good to us, whether it be labelled communism, socialism or capitalism....
My final aim is to bring Iran, within twenty years, to the same level of civilization and progress as will be enjoyed by the most highly developed countries. During the last ten years the degree of our backwardness has been halved, but it is this remaining backwardness which will be the most difficult to combat.

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi

Lenin was the contemporary politician whom [Mussolini] most admired and he studied the Russian revolution closely to see what lessons it offered. Lenin seemed to him 'the very negation of socialism' because he had not created a dictatorship of the proletariat or of the socialist party, but only of a few intellectuals who had found the secret of winning power. Mussolini was, in truth, envious.

Denis Mack Smith

Can't you approach the young worker and tell him that the way to live is to work for life and not for death? Is it beneath American scholars to try to do that?... Your only salvation is in carrying the idea of socialism to the working class and coming back to storm—to storm, yes, to storm—the bastions of capitalism.

Isaac Deutscher

Communism and socialism can be connected to a single major author—Marx—and assessed as deviations from, and implementations or negations of, Marx. Democracy is not amenable to a similar treatment; the towering, single major author on democracy does not exist.

Giovanni Sartori

We face a probable future of nuclear-armed states warring over a scarcity of resources; and that scarcity is largely the consequence of capitalism itself. For the first time in history, our prevailing form of life has the power not simply to breed racism and spread cultural cretinism, drive us into war or herd us into labour camps, but to wipe us from the planet. Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism. The traditional leftist slogan ''Socialism or barbarism'' was never more grimly apposite.

The language of priorities is the religion of socialism.

From a correct Marxian point of view … all measures designed to restrain, to regulate and to improve capitalism were simply "petty-bourgeois" nonsense … True socialists should not place any obstacles in the way of capitalist evolution. For only the full maturity of capitalism could bring about socialism. It is not only vain, but harmful to the interests of the proletarians to resort to such measures.

Ludwig von Mises

By exploiting material wealth confiscated and plundered in a racial war, Hitler's National Socialism achieved an unprecedented level of economic equality and created vast new opportunities for upward mobility for the German people.

The market came with the dawn of civilization and it is not an invention of capitalism... If it leads to improving the well-being of the people there is no contradiction with socialism.

Mikhail Gorbachev

Does he concede that the whole basis of the Maastricht treaty is the establishment of a European central bank which is staffed by bankers, independent of national Governments and national economic policies, and whose sole policy is the maintenance of price stability? That will undermine any social objective that any Labour Government in the United Kingdom—or any other Government—would wish to carry out. Does my hon. Friend recognise that the imposition of a bankers' Europe on the people of this continent will endanger the cause of socialism in the United Kingdom and in any other country?

Under communism (socialism), there is no incentive to supply people with anything they need or want, including safety.