Socialism Quotes

“The first duty of a man is to think for himself”
― Jose Marti

“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”
― Dom Helder Camara, Dom Helder Camara: Essential Writings

“You show me a capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker”
― Malcom X

“Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.”
― Vladimir Lenin

“Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.”
― Bertrand Russell, New Hopes for a Changing World

“The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.”
― Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours

“The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!”
― Albert Einstein

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory... Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
― Elizabeth Warren

“If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“The only way we'll get freedom for ourselves is to identify ourselves with every oppressed people in the world. We are blood brothers to the people of Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba -- yes Cuba too.”
― Malcolm X

“Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle.”
― Vladimir Lenin

“Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”
― Adam Smith

“Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.”
― Leon Trotsky

“Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“The greatest purveyor of violence in the world : My own Government, I can not be Silent.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all ... The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands - the ownership and control of their livelihoods - are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.”
― Helen Keller, Rebel Lives: Helen Keller

“Without Revolutionary theory, there can be no Revolutionary Movement.”
― Vladimir Lenin

“After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on "income distribution," the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.”
― Thomas Sowell

“Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.”
― Norman Mailer

“If there is ever a fascist takeover in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors but with lawyers and social workers saying. "I'm from the government and I'm here to help.”
― Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with "I," "me," "mine," that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else's.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy

“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

“I am, at the Fed level, libertarian;
at the state level, Republican;
at the local level, Democrat;
and at the family and friends level, a socialist.
If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the game

“It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville

“If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.”
― Mikhail Bakunin

“A child who does not think about what happens around him and is content with living without wondering whether he lives honestly is like a man who lives from a scoundrel's work and is on the road to being a scoundrel.”
― Jose Marti

“The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto