Social Ownership Quotes

Socialism is a wonderful idea. It is only as a reality that it has been disastrous. Among people of every race, color, and creed, all around the world, socialism has led to hunger in countries that used to have surplus food to export.... Nevertheless, for many of those who deal primarily in ideas, socialism remains an attractive idea -- in fact, seductive. Its every failure is explained away as due to the inadequacies of particular leaders.

I am opposed to socialism because it dreams ingenuously of good, truth, beauty, and equal rights.

Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species

The aim of socialism is not only to abolish the present division of mankind into smaller states and all-national isolation, not only to bring the nations closer to each other, but also to merge them.

The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual property rights.

Communism is quite obviously still a threat. Yes, they are human beings, with a right to their point of view . . .

All socialism involves slavery. That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labours under coercion to satisfy anothers desires.

Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.

Between complete socialism and communism there is no difference whatever in my mind.Communism is in fact the completion of socialism; when that ceases to be militant and becomes triumphant, it will be communism.

Property, said Proudhon, is theft. This is the only perfect truism that has been uttered on the subject.

Socialism is humanity's second nature. All politicians do is turn human vice into votes.

That democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, but that to strive for it produces something so utterly different that few of those who wish it would be prepared to accept the consequences, many will not believe until the connection has been laid bare in all its aspects.

Socialism can only be put into practice only by methods which most socialists disapprove.

The economy of communism is an economy which grows in an atmosphere of misery and want.

Labor is the source of all wealth, and of all civilization; and since it is only through society that generally productive labor is possible, the whole product of labor, where there is a general obligation to work, belongs to society, - that is, to all its members, by equal right, to each according to his reasonable needs.

Admittedly communism has not been achieved in Russia. State socialism has been built.

The real case against socialism is not its economic inefficiency, though on all sides there is evidence of that. Much more fundamental is its basic immorality.

We built this [socialistic] society not for the curbing of personal liberty, but in order that human personalities should really feel free.

For it is an essential difference between capitalist and socialist production that under capitalism men provide for themselves, while under Socialism they are provided for.

There are social democrats and others who are marching more in the direction of equality, whether you call them socialists or communists... Capitalism has only hurt Latin America.

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it.

Communists are frustrated capitalists.

By abolishing private property one deprives the human love of aggression.

It is a very good thing, and a significant one too, to exterminate the bourgeoisie and capitalism in China.

Communism was a great system for making people equally poor - in fact, there was no better system in the world for that than communism. Capitalism made people unequally rich.