Alan Charles Kors Quotes (46 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

As quoted in "Notable & Quotable: The Victims of Socialism" https://web.archive.org/web/20160217064704/http://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-the-victims-of-socialism-1455667462 (17 February 2016), The Wall Street Journal, A13 <br class="br">2000s, Can There Be an "After Socialism"? (2003)

“Let the dead bury the dead? But, the dead can bury no one.”

Alan Charles Kors

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011)

“We are either all equally free, or we are not free.”

Alan Charles Kors

2010s, Who's too Weak to Live with Freedom? (2013)

“How mute we were in 1989 during what should have been at the least the celebration of the fall of the world's most powerful hammer and sickle, symbol of the ultimate human slaughter. If it had been the Third Reich Swastika that had fallen after two generations of Cold War, the joy and catharsis would have lit our cities.”

Alan Charles Kors

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011)

“[F]reedom depended ultimately on the outcome struggle between private property, voluntary production, and voluntary exchange on the one hand, and central planning on the other.”

Alan Charles Kors

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011)

“Socialism almost never has been judged as a goal in value by the experience of communism in power.”

Alan Charles Kors

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011)

“The critical thing, I mean, what I would keep my eye on, is private property. If the state can take away property that you owned, that you've lived on, and give it to a developer because that's good for economic development, not to mention the developer gives lots of money to the local politicians, if private property goes, then in my view there is no safeguard whatsoever, and I would always keep my eye on the relationship with government to private property.”

Alan Charles Kors

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011), Q&A

“[S]ocialism with authentic, political power must lead to tyranny and cruelty.”

Alan Charles Kors

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011)

“The crucial moment of the end of the Cold War for me was the meeting between Gorbachev and Honecker, tyrant of East Germany, and Honecker said to him, and I'm sure Gorbachev is accurately conveying it, Honecker said to him if you don't send the tanks, "If you don't let us send out the tanks, it will be the fall of communism", and Gorbachev said "I wont send out the tanks, you may not send out the tanks."”

Alan Charles Kors

and I believe in China they will send out the tanks.
2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011), Q&A

“I think it's almost impossible to impose a free and liberal society from the outside.”

Alan Charles Kors

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011), Q&A

“Socialism, wherever it actually had the means to plan a society, to pursue efficaciously its vision of the abolition of private property, economic inequality, and the allocation of capital and goods by free markets, culminated in the crushing of individual, economic, religious, associational, and political liberty. Its collectivization of agriculture alone led to untold suffering, scarcity, and contempt for property as the fruit of labor.”

Alan Charles Kors

2000s, Can There Be an "After Socialism"? (2003)

“[S]ocialism was to reap the cultural, scientific, creative, and communal rewards of abolishing private property and free markets, and to end human tyranny. Using the command of the state, Communism sought to create this socialist society. What in fact occurred was the achievement of power by a group of inhumane despots: Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Castro, Mengistu, Ceausescu, Hoxha, and so on, and so on.”

Alan Charles Kors

2000s, Can There Be an "After Socialism"? (2003)

“Students once asked me, if being a historian, I could predict the future and I said "No, I can't. But, I can tell what you what won't happen.", and someone said "What won't happen? What do you know what won't happen?" and I gave two answers. I said "Russia will never allow the reunification of Germany" and "whites in South Africa will never give up their tyranny without a bloodbath." So, let's not take me as a prophet.”

Alan Charles Kors

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011), Q&A

“The problem of free speech in, both in society in general and on campus in particular, is everyone will say "I believe in free speech, but." The problem is everyone has a different "But!" exemption that they would put on free speech. So the issue really becomes, who has the power to enforce their exemptions to free speech while keeping absolute free speech for themselves?”

Alan Charles Kors

2010s, Who's too Weak to Live with Freedom? (2013)

“Chile offered refuge and asylum to Erich Honecker, the tyrant of East Germany who wanted the tanks in the streets. Everyone said, "It is time to bury the past without bitterness." But then Chile clamored for justice for General Augusto Pinochet. On the same day, Spain indicted Chile's Pinochet for crimes against humanity, and welcomed with honors, Fidel Castro, while Castro's critics or any group that annoyed the tyrant, lay dead or rotted in prison, or tried to recover from the deadly work camps to which he sent them.”

Alan Charles Kors

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011)

“Until socialism is confronted with its lived, communist reality, the gravest atrocities of all recorded human life, we live in its age.”

Alan Charles Kors

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011)

“The logic of governmental power is to exercise it such that Republicans can talk "Terrific free market!" language until they actually have power. Where upon, its program after program and crony after crony. The extraordinary bailout occurred under the Bush administration. I think that raises extraordinary dangers of the fact that as power accumulates, it never gives anything back. Its always expanding.”

Alan Charles Kors

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011), Q&A

“[V]oluntary exchange among individuals held morally responsible under the rule of law creates both prosperity and an unparalleled diversity of human choices. Such a model also has been a precondition of individuation and freedom. By contrast, regimes of central planning create poverty and occasion ineluctable developments toward totalitarianism and the worst abuses of power. Dynamic free-market societies, grounded in rights-based individualism, have altered the entire human conception of liberty and of dignity for formerly marginalized groups. The entire "socialist experiment," by contrast, ended in stasis; ethnic hatreds; the absence of even the minimal preconditions of economic, social, and political renewal; and categorical contempt for both individuation and minority rights. Our children do not know this true comparison.”

Alan Charles Kors

2000s, Can There Be an "After Socialism"? (2003)

“Western intellectuals fail to understand and appreciate the form of society that has given us the ability to alter those defaults. They believe both that the most productive human cultures are almost totally dysfunctional, and that evolved, successful societies may be re-drawn at will by intellectuals with political and cultural power. They write as if relative pockets of Western poverty should occasion our astonishment, when in fact the term, until recently, for almost infinitely worse levels of poverty, was simply "human life."”

Alan Charles Kors

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011)

“[W]hen Eisenhower heard that the German residents of a nearby city "didn't know" about a death camp whose stench should have reached their nostrils, he marched them, well-dressed, through the rotting corpses, and made them help dispose of the dead. The mayor of Gotha and his wife, went home from this and hanged themselves. We lack Eisenhower's authority.”

Alan Charles Kors

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011)

“Kids, who in the 1960s had portraits of Mao and Che on their college walls, the moral equivalent of having hung portrait of Hitler or Goebbels in one's dorm, now teach our children about the moral superiority of their generation.”

Alan Charles Kors

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011)

“If someone tells you you are too weak to live with freedom, they have turned you into a child”

Alan Charles Kors

As quoted in "College" (2005), Bullshit!, HBO
2000s
Context: What universities are saying by these codes, special protections, and double standards — to women, to blacks, to Hispanics, to gay and lesbian students — is, "You are too weak to live with freedom. You are too weak to live with the First Amendment." If someone tells you you are too weak to live with freedom, they have turned you into a child.

“Ask college freshmen how many died under Stalin's regime, and they will answer even now, "Thousands? Tens of thousands?" What does that mean? It is the equivalent of believing that Hitler killed hundreds of Jews.”

Alan Charles Kors

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011)

“There are in the final analysis, two kinds of decisions. One, decisions you make for yourself and two decisions other people make for you, whether it's one tyrant or 51% of your fellow citizens.”

Alan Charles Kors

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011), Q&A

“What should have occurred after the fall of the Berlin Wall? For almost 50 years, America had sacrificed its wealth and at times the lives of its young, to contain armed communism. Its brave pilots risked their lives by skimming the hills of Western Europe to the great annoyance of German picnickers whose liberty depended, in fact, on such sacrifice. Its submariners left behind comfort, family, and friends, to make full deterrents real. Its men and women in uniform stood at places of peril, willing to risk their lives for our liberty. The West did whatever it had to do to prevent the armed Bolsheviks from achieving tactical or strategic superiority. It sustained its will and its great burden of debt even when its artists, college students, professors, authors and filmmakers, turned against the alleged folly of such efforts. It obsessed on communism and anti-communism; it was haunted by its own and its enemy's bombs, missiles, and nuclear strategies. This was the burden it chose to bear. And then, in a seeming miracle, the fatal weaknesses of tyranny, central planning, and il-liberalism, at a moment of American will, were actualized in the collapse of European communism. Now we could assess and do a real accounting of what we had fought to preserve and to prevent.”

Alan Charles Kors

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011)

“I don't think that you can't impose liberal societies from, from the outside.”

Alan Charles Kors

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011), Q&A