Richard D. Wolff Quotes

What happened under communism - and increasingly, is happening in America, as Joseph Sobran put it: 'Need' now means wanting someone else's money. 'Greed' means wanting to keep your own. 'Compassion' is when a politician arranges the transfer.'

… a communist program

I certainly did not know what the word 'socialism' meant growing up, because I was brought up in a very nonpolitical family. My brother was somewhat active, but my parents were not.

If everyone in China is a socialist, from whom do they steal?

Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build, it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created.

In the last few years we have learned to distinguish the means of Socialism from the ends.

Then there was communism's weak-tea sister, socialism. Socialists maintained that we shouldn't take all the money away from all the people since all the people don't have money. We should take all the money away from only the people who make money. Then, when we run out of that, we could take more money from the people who...hey, wait! Where'd you people go? What do you mean you're "tax exiles in Monaco?"

There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism - by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.

Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement. It is by no means an obvious remedy for the obvious evil which the interests of that class will necessarily demand. It is a construction of theorists.

I think the thing about capitalism is it's an evil necessity, capitalism. Communism has been tried and failed, and socialism, that doesn't work very well. Capitalism works, but the problem about capitalism is it does mean that a few individuals become very wealthy. Therefore, I think those individuals have enormous responsibility to redistribute that wealth either by creating new businesses or creating new jobs and making sure that money just doesn't lie in a bank account for future generations.

Socialism, in the traditional sense, meant government ownership and operation of the means of production. Outside of North Korea and a couple of other spots, no one in the world today would define socialism that way. That will never come back.

The words Socialism and Communism have the same meaning. They indicate a condition of society in which the wealth of the community: the land and the means of production, distribution and transport are held in common, production being for use and not for profit.

I am a socialist. However, I have to add that what I understand by socialism is exactly the opposite of what many people, or most people, today mean by socialism.

To call yourself a socialist in 2015 is to be an idiot. Socialism fails. Everywhere.

If government could create jobs and raise children, socialism would have worked.

Communism is evil. Its driving forces are the deadly sins of envy and hatred.

I believe that the madness of Communism would be the sole victor.

Conservatives recognize there's gonna be winners and losers. The communists say that's not right. There shouldn't be any losers, and they set about trying to create circumstances where people think nobody will lose. But everybody loses under communism. They eventually have to build walls around countries to keep people in, as in the Berlin Wall.

The most eloquent eulogy of capitalism was made by its greatest enemy. Marx is only anti-capitalist in so far as capitalism is out of date.

Sharia has a ruling system, an economic system, a policy and social system, a foreign policy and judiciary system to be implemented, you know, the whole package. Under the Sharia, food, shelter and clothing will be provided for all citizens in addition to basic necessities like gas and water as well. But, it's not like communism or socialism in the respect that you can work for the luxuries.

Communism has served us ill in having us swap a living brotherhood for what looks to have the features of the coldest of all chill abstractions.

According to a Pew poll, 49% of young Americans have a favorable view of socialism. What is socialism? it is a system that leads to mass misery, mass impoverishment, and human slaughter. That's what it means. Yet almost half of the young think it's benign.

No one is born a Communist... in the Soviet Union farmers keep on looking in the barn for their horses even after they have given them to the collective.

Communism means barbarism.

Why is it always the "intelligent" people who are socialists?