quotations about socialism
For billions of people throughout the optimistically styled "developing world," socialism is a dreary reality. Such countries mostly adopted socialism before accruing capital for socialists to squander, and as a result, socialism has kept them in permanent impoverishment.
CHARLES SCALIGER
"The Fruits of Socialism", The New American, August 14, 2017
Socialism is a political vision of religious and moral import, whereas capitalism is a self-regulating system, deploying a means-end rationality. The two are in different orders of reality.
CHARLES DAVIS
"The End of Socialism?", After Socialism?: The Future of Radical Christianity
This isn't new. Those who favor socialism always make the moral case for it. The truth is, maybe they actually believe in it, but in the real world, socialism harms, it weakens the economies of countries that have tried it. It just does. Weaker economies hurt everybody in them. Socialism kills incentive, opportunity, freedom. It is the opposite of what America is all about. Look, socialism always harms the people it claims to help the most. It handicaps them, leaving them weaker, less self-determined, less free. We should have this debate out in the open.
BOBBY JINDAL
The Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2015
In its early days, socialism was a revolutionary movement of which the object was the liberation of the wage-earning classes and the establishment of freedom and justice. The passage from capitalism to the new régime was to be sudden and violent: capitalists were to be expropriated without compensation, and their power was not to be replaced by any new authority. Gradually a change came over the spirit of socialism. In France, socialists became members of the government, and made and unmade parliamentary majorities. In Germany, social democracy grew so strong that it became impossible for it to resist the temptation to barter away some of its intransigeance in return for government recognition of its claims. In England, the Fabians taught the advantage of reform as against revolution, and of conciliatory bargaining as against irreconcilable antagonism. The method of gradual reform has many merits as compared to the method of revolution, and I have no wish to preach revolution. But gradual reform has certain dangers, to wit, the ownership or control of businesses hitherto in private hands, and by encouraging legislative interference for the benefit of various sections of the wage-earning classes. I think it is at least doubtful whether such measures do anything at all to contribute toward the ideals which inspired the early socialists and still inspire the great majority of those who advocate some form of socialism.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
"Pitfalls of Socialism", Political Ideals
It may be said that the power of officials is much less dangerous than the power of capitalists, because officials have no economic interests that are opposed to those of wage-earners. But this argument involves far too simple a theory of political human nature--a theory which orthodox socialism adopted from the classical political economy, and has tended to retain in spite of growing evidence of its falsity. Economic self-interest, and even economic class-interest, is by no means the only important political motive. Officials, whose salary is generally quite unaffected by their decisions on particular questions, are likely, if they are of average honesty, to decide according to their view of the public interest; but their view will none the less have a bias which will often lead them wrong. It is important to understand this bias before entrusting our destinies too unreservedly to government departments.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
"Pitfalls of Socialism", Political Ideals
I believe Socialism is the grandest theory ever presented, and I am sure it will someday rule the world. Then we will have attained the Millennium.... Then men will be content to work for the general welfare and share their riches with their neighbors.
ANDREW CARNAGIE
"A Millionaire Socialist", New York Times, January 1, 1885
Socialism is not a science, a sociology in miniature: it is a cry of pain.
ÉMILE DURKHEIM
Le socialisme
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
speech in the House of Commons, "Demobilisation", October 22, 1945
I pass the test that says a man who isn't a socialist at 20 has no heart, and a man who is a socialist at 40 has no head.
WILLIAM CASEY
attributed, Washington Post, May 7, 1987
We want to achieve a new and better order of society: in this new and better society there must be neither rich nor poor; all will have to work. Not a handful of rich people, but all the working people must enjoy the fruits of their common labour. Machines and other improvements must serve to ease the work of all and not to enable a few to grow rich at the expense of millions and tens of millions of people. This new and better society is called socialist society. The teachings about this society are called socialism.
VLADIMIR LENIN
"To the Rural Poor", Collected Works
I am a Socialist not through reading a textbook that has caught my intellectual fancy, nor through unthinking tradition, but because I believe that, at its best, Socialism corresponds most closely to an existence that is both rational and moral. It stands for co-operation, not confrontation; for fellowship, not fear. It stands for equality, not because it wants people to be the same but because only through equality in our economic circumstances can our individuality develop properly.
TONY BLAIR
maiden speech as MP for Sedgefield, July 6, 1983
A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.
TERRY EAGLETON
Ideology: An Introduction
The only hope of socialism resides in those who have already brought about in themselves, as far as is possible in the society of today, that union between manual and intellectual labor which characterizes the society we are aiming at.
SIMONE WEIL
Oppression and Liberty
Socialism is in a way the shadow of capitalism. Nothing guarantees the future of socialism so much as capitalism, because socialism is capitalism's self-criticism.
RICHARD WOLFF
interview, Fox Business, August 2017
The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact, scarcely anyone at all escapes.
OSCAR WILDE
"The Soul of Man Under Socialism", The Essays of Oscar Wilde
Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Yes? Well socialism is exactly the reverse.
LEN DEIGHTON
Funeral in Berlin
As we know, socialism is calculational chaos. Rational appraisement and allocation are eternally elusive. It is a gigantic negative-sum game in which each player quickly grabs a piece of the pie, and all the while the pie shrinks before the players' eyes.
LARRY J. SECHREST
Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture at the Austrian Scholars Conference in Auburn, Alabama, "The Anti-Capitalists: Barbarians at the Gate", March 15, 2008
Socialists make the mistake of confusing individual worth with success. They believe you cannot allow people to succeed in case those who fail feel worthless.
KENNETH BAKER
London Observer, July 13, 1986
The ripeness of society for Socialism is not to be disproved by the number of wrecks and ruins which abound.
JOHN SPARGO
Elements of Socialism
Anyone who objects to any government whatsoever as a form of socialism ought not to pull that socialist lever in their home, the one that makes their waste disappear in a whirlpool into the socialized sewage treatment plant.
JOHN MÉDAILLE
The Distributist Review, August 31, 2009