Mikhail Gorbachev Quotes

The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution.

From 1945 to 1974, the Western world - including America - was more socialistic than capitalistic, more pro-labor than pro-business.

There are different ways to organise capitalism. Free-market capitalism is only one of them-and not a very good one at that.

Socialism's not a word that I use. I say 'social democracy' because I don't think the government needs to own all the means of production.

But we don't have an example of a democratic society existing in a socialist economy - which is the only real alternative to capitalism in the modern world.

You can talk about capitalism and communism and all that sort of thing, but the important thing is the struggle everybody is engaged in to get better living conditions, and they are not interested too much in government.

There's something about China and its rush to capitalism that I find confusing. At the same time, we live in an America where capitalists oppose any government interference with free markets, while in China you have a very controlled, state-planned market where economic growth is better than ours.

SOCIALISM—You have two cows, you give one to your neighbor; COMMUNISM—You have two cows, the government takes them both and gives you the milk; FASCISM—You have two cows, the government takes both and sells you the milk NAZISM—You have two cows, the government takes both and shoots you; CAPITALISM—You have two cows, you sell one and buy a bull; TRADE UNIONISM—You have two cows, they take them from you, shoot one, milk the other and throw the milk away; MORAL: Don't have anything to do with cows. They only bring you trouble.

Some communist countries think that free enterprise will save them the same way that they thought communism would save them.

[The choice is between] chaos, confusion, bankruptcy, state socialism or communism, and the American way of life.

Individualism is to collectivism as capitalism is to socialism

We adopt no slogan but we embrace everything which seems good to us, whether it be labeled communism, socialism or capitalism....

Any nation's right to form a government and an economic system of its own choosing is inalienable.... Any nation's attempt to dictate to other nations their form of government is indefensible.

In America, we don't, in daily discourse, use the words 'capitalism' or 'socialism.' They've been kind of nonexistent words, I would say, amongst the general public.

The wild open-market theory that died in 1929 had a run of just over thirty years. Communism, a complete melding of religious, economic, and global theories, stretched to seventy years in Russia and forty-five years in central Europe, thanks precisely to the intensive use of military and police force.

People like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been very busy educating America about just how much socialism we have, from Social Security to Medicare to public schools to public universities, and how much we love that. The truth is that there is no pure socialist or capitalist economy on earth.

If you aren't talking to your kids about socialism, someone else is. So use car time, dinner time, tax preparation time, and time spent together at your work or small business to teach your child about the virtues of capitalism, the system of government that has lifted more people out of poverty.

The time has come for everybody -capitalists, communists, socialists- to ask themselves what 'civilization' really means. If not, whether a country calls itself capitalist or communists, in the pursuit of 'progress' , it will visit genocide either on its own people or on another people whose country must be plundered for resources to feed the Progress industry.

You just overwhelm the system with so many dependents and so many middle class benefits having to be paid that the money isn't there. It causes a system-wide collapse, capitalism implodes upon itself, and somebody comes into the breach and restructures the government as a socialist utopian paradise - and the guy's dead serious about it.

The system that would stand midway between capitalism and socialism.

Impotence therefore faces both those who believe in what amounts to a pure, stateless, market capitalism, a sort of international bourgeois anarchism, and those who believe in a planned socialism uncontaminated by private profit-seeking. Both are bankrupt. The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another. But how? That is the problem for everybody today, but especially for people on the left.

Creativity is the foundation of wealth. All progress comes from the creative minority. Under capitalism, wealth is less a stock of goods than a flow of ideas, the defining characteristic of which is surprise. If it were not surprising, we could plan it, and socialism would work.

If we take the pope at his word and socialism is highly preferable to capitalism and he was really concerned about these people, he would demand they go home. He would demand they return to their homelands wherever they are, if they were socialist.

I don't think that the contradictions between capitalism and socialism can be resolved by war. This is no longer the age of the bow and arrow. It's the nuclear age, and war can annihilate us all. The only way to achieve solutions seems to be for the different social systems to coexist.

The 21st century will not be about the battle between capitalism and socialism but between the forces of progress and the forces of conservatism.