Socialist Quotes - page 25
George Orwell wrote in 1942 at the height of his revulsion from what he regarded as the feeble hypocrisy of English socialist journalism. If he were alive today he would no doubt derive much ironic amusement from the changed position in popular esteem of the Boers in this half-century from that of the gallant little people fighting for their homesteads and way of life to that of the villains of apartheid.
Evelyn Waugh
[If Britain withdrew from the EEC] the wild men of the left would certainly try to build a barrier against the outside world. But they would be confronted by such powerful economic gales that they would be forced to build the barriers higher and higher until they had finally built an economic Berlin wall around Britain. Within that wall would be a socialist state running a siege economy.
Edward Heath
Before they [Labour] came in unemployment was gradually improving year by year. Since they have been in it has gone up. Before they came in the cost of living was going down. It has gone up. Since they came in the number of houses that had been built for the workmen had gone down and their cost gone up. Before they came in the export trade of this country was gradually but steadily improving. Have you seen the last returns? They are going down. If this is what Mr. Ramsay MacDonald means by a Labour success, Heaven save this country any more Socialist triumphs.
David Lloyd George
Hayek sees that the zero-sum vision is fired by an implacable negative energy. It is not the concrete vision of some real alternative that animates the socialist critic of the capitalist order. It is hostility toward the actual, and in particular toward those who enjoy advantages within it. Hence the belief in equality remains vague and undefined, except negatively. For it is essentially a weapon against the existing order – a way of undermining its claims to legitimacy, by discovering a victim for every form of success. The striving for equality is, in other words, based in ressentiment in Nietzsche's sense, the state of mind that Max Scheler identified as the principal motive behind the socialist orthodoxy of his day. It is one of the major problems of modern politics, which no classical liberal could possibly solve, how to govern a society in which resentment has acquired the kind of privileged social, intellectual, and political position that we witness today.
Friedrich Hayek
Hayek himself gradually identified with classical liberalism in a more specific sense. But it seems to me an open question just where his arguments should lead us. Hayek himself started with socialist concerns and sentiments. He also clearly favored extra-market welfare provision, at least within rich countries, and his Road to Serfdom allows for government to play quite a considerable role. I would have thought that his arguments point us in the direction of ideas that everyone should pay attention to, rather than just offering a positive program for one specific view of politics. At the same time we may find that the kind of structural characteristics that he discerns in our society, and the kind of freedom we need in order to learn, may make certain kinds of otherwise attractive ideals difficult to pursue. They may also, however, make it difficult for us to solve certain other kinds of problem – such as some issues concerned with the environment.
Friedrich Hayek
Socialism means the community in bonds. If you establish a Socialist community it means the most comprehensive, universal, and pervasive tyranny that this country has ever seen, the flaw that enters into everything in all the relations of life. It is like the sand of the desert. It gets into your food, your clothes, your machinery, the very air you breathe. They are all gritty with regulations, orders, decrees, rules. That is what Socialism means. You cannot trust liberty to Socialism. The only hope of liberty is in Liberalism, for Liberalism alone believes in it.
David Lloyd George
Is a sense of national pride alien to us, Great-Russian class-conscious proletarians? Certainly not! We love our language and our country, and we are doing our very utmost to raise her' toiling masses (i.e., ninth-tenths of her population) to the level of a democratic and socialist consciousness. To us it is most painful to see and feel the outrages, the oppression an the humiliation our fair country suffers at the hands of the tsar's butchers, the nobles and the capitalists.
Vladimir Lenin
The artist is usually a child of his times, especially if his formative years fell in the period of early socialism. My formative years coincided with that period, and I was totally caught up in the socialist movement. At that time, the idea of a conscious commitment to serve the proletariat was the farthest thing from my mind. But what use to me were principles of beauty like those of the Greeks, for example, principles that I could not feel as my own and identify with? The simple fact of the matter was that I found the proletariat beautiful.
Käthe Kollwitz
My purpose here is to denounce an idea which seems to be dangerous and false. ... Revolutionary trade unionists and orthodox communists are at one in considering everything that is purely theoretical as bourgeois. ... The culture of a socialist society would be a synthesis of theory and practice; but to synthesize is not the same as to confuse together; it is only contraries that can be synthesized. ... Marx's principal glory is to have rescued the study of societies not only from Utopianism but also and at the same time from empiricism. ... Humanity cannot progress by importing into theoretical study the processes of blind routine and haphazard experiment by which production has so long been dominated. ... The true relation between theory and application only appears when theoretical research has been purged of all empiricism.
Simone Weil
Only one force can arise today to challenge the continuing decay and increasing barbarism of all regimes based upon exploitation: that of the producing class, the socialist proletariat. Constantly increasing in numbers through the industrialization of the world economy, ever more concentrated in the process of production, trained through misery and oppression to revolt against the ruling classes having had the chance to experience the results of its own "leadership," the working class, despite an increasing number of difficulties and obstacles, has ripened for revolution. The obstacles confronting it are not insurmountable. The whole history of the past century is there to prove that the proletariat represents, for the first time in human history, not only a class in revolt against exploitation but a class positively capable of overthrowing the exploiters and of organizing a free an d humane society. Its victory, and the fate of humanity, are in its hands.
Cornelius Castoriadis
He [Hockney's father] hardly ever left Bradford. He was a member of CND and a socialist with a rather romantic and naive idea of what Soviet Russia was like, all cornfields and ballet. He would have gone mad for email because he was always sending letters to world leaders - Eisenhower, Mao, Stalin - telling them what was what. I think he imagined the Politburo would hold up his letter and say, "Hold everything, Kenneth Hockney has written again!"
David Hockney
The land will therefore belong to the State in one or other of its several forms, and rent will be State income. The great factory industries will be controlled by associations of consumers which again will be identical with the State in some one or other of its aspects... the socialist state will mainly concern itself with co-ordinating production and consumption so as to prevent gluts, useless labour, unearned incomes, industrial loss, surplus values,-the causes of poverty.
Ramsay MacDonald
One of the great reasons why I belong to the Labour Party and hold the Socialist views of what a wise and just social structure is, is because I detest class politics and want to end them in real national unity. In bringing that about we have to consider the claims of the great mass of our people, who, on account of their poverty, cannot adequately protect themselves. What has national unity meant to them? A change in a machine can make them outcasts; a change in fashion can make them paupers... The Labour Party wants to bring within the bounds and the meaning of this national unity the bottom dog, as he is called. For this purpose we have organised our great public services. The Labour Party wishes to develop them.
Ramsay MacDonald
China's revolution exerts an attraction on all the revolutionary people in the world, who identify with it. Our drive for socialist modernization has enlisted their interest and support and will continue to do so ever more widely. We must endeavour to increase international academic exchanges and expand our friendly contacts and co-operation with scientific circles in other countries. We would like to express our heartfelt thanks to all friends abroad who have helped us in science and technology.
Deng Xiaoping
If the Socialist Party is prepared to make friends with Russia, which is a dictatorship with which no Englishman can really agree, why can we not make friends with Italy and Germany? There are people saying Herr Hitler has broken his word. I tell you that the one bargain he has made with us, that the German Navy should be one third of the size of the British Navy, he has kept, and kept loyally.
Rab Butler
ISIL herded approximately 450−500 women and girls to the citadel of Tal Afar in Ninewa where, two days later, 150 unmarried girls and women, predominantly from the Yezidi and Christian communities, were reportedly transported to Syria, either to be given to ISIL fighters as a reward or to be sold as sex slaves, the report said. So where are the 'war on women' advocates? I know, crickets chirping. The progressive socialist feminist movement would rather not have Obama admit he was wrong than save these women.
Allen West (politician)
But after all, my dear friends, does Bolshevism exist in Russia? It does not any longer. There are no longer councils of the factories, but dictators of the factories; no longer eight hours of work, but twelve; no longer equal salaries, but thirty-five different categories, not according to need, but according to merit. There is not in Russia even that liberty which there is in Italy. Is there a dictatorship of the proletariat? No! Is there a dictatorship of the Socialists? No! There is a dictatorship of a few intelligent men, not workmen, who belong to a section of the Socialist Party, and their dictatorship is opposed by all other sections. This dictatorship of a few men is what is called Bolshevism. Now we do not want this in Italy.
Benito Mussolini
The fight for ideals can no longer take the form of fight between nations, because the lines of division on moral questions are within the nations themselves and intersect the political frontiers. There is no modern State which is completely Catholic or Protestant, or liberal or autocratic, or aristocratic or democratic, or socialist or individualist; the moral and spiritual struggles of the modern world go on between citizens of the same State in unconscious intellectual cooperation with corresponding groups in other states, not between the public powers of rival States.
Norman Angell
16) There is no cause so right that one cannot find a fool following it.
To prove a point, one may seek out a foolish Socialist, thirteenth century Liberal, Scientologist, High Frontier advocate, Mensa member, science fiction fan, Jim Bakker acolyte, Christian, witch, or fanatical devotee of Special Interest Lib. It doesn't really reflect on the cause itself. Ad hominem argument saves time, but it's still a fallacy.
Larry Niven
