“There are some of our own people who still think that the Communists are the left wing of the Socialist movement. They are not. The Socialist movement was a movement for freedom in its widest sense. From the point of view of freedom, Communists are on the extreme right—more reactionary than some of the old tyrannies which we knew in the past. What is the thing for which we fight, for which the men with whom we feel the stir of sympathy throughout the ages have fought? Freedom. But that fight changes from age to age and the freedom that some men fought for may turn out to be tyranny. Communists, concentrating solely on the economic aspects of freedom…have produced the ghastly travesty of Socialism in the lands behind the iron curtain.”

Speech in Glasgow (10 April 1949), quoted in The Times (11 April 1949), p. 4
Prime Minister

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "There are some of our own people who still think that the Communists are the left wing of the Socialist movement. They …" by Clement Attlee?
Clement Attlee photo
Clement Attlee 95
Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 1883–1967

Related quotes

Clement Attlee photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“I'm getting sick and tired of people saying that this movement has been infiltrated by Communists. There are as many Communists in this freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Interview in Playboy (January 1965) https://web.archive.org/web/20080706183244/http://www.playboy.com/arts-entertainment/features/mlk/04.html
1960s

“If we don’t view our fellow activists as human beings rather than symbols of what’s right or wrong with the movement, then whom are we fighting for?”

Remembering Pioneering Feminist Shulamith Firestone http://blogs.forward.com/sisterhood-blog/174721/jewish-feminist-shulamith-firestones-lessons/?utm_source=t.co&utm_campaign=&utm_content=general-general&utm_medium=jd.fo-other#ixzz2QH2HKUQg "Jewish Daily Forward," April 11, 2013

Götz Aly photo

“Another source of the Nazi Party’s popularity was its liberal borrowing from the intellectual tradition of the socialist left. Many of the men who would become the movement’s leaders had been involved in communist and socialist circles.”

Götz Aly (1947) German journalist, historian and social scientist

Source: Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (2007), p. 16

Jean Paul Sartre photo
Noam Chomsky photo

“Lenin was a right-wing deviation of the socialist movement”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Speech on “Lenin, Trotsky and Socialism and the Soviet Union”, (March 15, 1989) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQsceZ9skQI
Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1980s
Context: Lenin was a right-wing deviation of the socialist movement and he was so regarded…by the mainstream Marxists… Bolshevism was a right-wing deviation.

Eleanor Roosevelt photo

“This freedom of which men speak, for which they fight, seems to some people a perilous thing. It has to be earned at a bitter cost and then — it has to be lived with. For freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility.”

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States

Source: You Learn by Living (1960), p. 152
Context: "Anxiety," Kierkegaard said, "is the dizziness of freedom." This freedom of which men speak, for which they fight, seems to some people a perilous thing. It has to be earned at a bitter cost and then — it has to be lived with. For freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect.
We must all face and unpalatable fact that we have, too often, a tendency to skim over; we proceed on the assumption that all men want freedom. This is not as true as we would like it to be. Many men and women who are far happier when they have relinquish their freedom, when someone else guides them, makes their decisions for them, takes the responsibility for them and their actions. They don't want to make up their minds. They don't want to stand on their own feet.

Eugene V. Debs photo
Stafford Cripps photo

“The reactionaries of our Movement are keen to prevent Socialists from coming into it. The last thing anyone should do is to pander to the reactionaries by staying out. James Maxton and Harry Pollitt should be the Leaders of the Labour Movement today”

Stafford Cripps (1889–1952) British politician

The Manchester Guardian (15 February 1937), quoted in Hugh Dalton, The Fateful Years. Memoirs 1931-1945 (London: Frederick Muller Ltd, 1957), p. 151

Eric Hobsbawm photo

Related topics