Quotes about socialism
page 15

Robert Hunter (author) photo
Jeremy Corbyn photo
Walter Rauschenbusch photo

“Under the warm breath of religious faith all social institutions become plastic.”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Introduction, p.xii

Joseph Goebbels photo
Neil deGrasse Tyson photo
Roger Scruton photo
Honoré de Balzac photo

“The sanctity of womanhood is incompatible with social liberty and social claims; and for a woman emancipation means corruption.”

La sainteté des femmes est inconciliable avec les devoirs et les libertés du monde. Emanciper les femmes, c'est les corrompre.
Source: A Woman of Thirty (1842), Ch. III: At Thirty Years.

Roger Ebert photo
Anthony Eden photo
Hermann Rauschning photo
C. Wright Mills photo

“[O]ne could translate the 555 pages of The Social System into about 150 pages of straightforward English. The result would not be very impressive.”

Source: The Sociological Imagination (1959), p. 31, commenting on the verbosity of the chief work of competing sociologist Talcott Parsons.

Ernesto Che Guevara photo
Eric R. Kandel photo
Bal Gangadhar Tilak photo

“Progress is implied in independence. Without self-government neither industrial progress is possible, nor the educational scheme will be useful to the nation…To make efforts for India’s freedom is more important than social reforms.”

Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920) Indian independence activist

[Hunt, Frazier, Great Personalities, http://books.google.com/books?id=EgEZRS4xer0C&pg=PT153, 1931, New York Life Insurance Company, 153–]

Mitt Romney photo
Ian McDonald photo
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury photo
Enver Hoxha photo
Émile Durkheim photo
Rudolf Rocker photo
Alfred de Zayas photo
Angela Davis photo
Janusz Korwin-Mikke photo

“Socialism is a monster that will die.”

Janusz Korwin-Mikke (1942) polish politician

Source: Blog of the autor, 27 June 2007 http://korwin-mikke.blog.onet.pl/Socjalizm-to-po-prostu-zaraza,2,ID223835291,n

Lyndall Urwick photo
Walter Rauschenbusch photo

“The fundamental purpose of Jesus was the establishment of the kingdom of God, which involved a thorough regeneration and reconstitution of social life.”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Ch.4 Why Has Christianity Never Undertaken the Work of Social Reconstruction?, p. 143

John D. Rockefeller, Jr. photo

“I believe that truth and justice are fundamental to an enduring social order.”

John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (1874–1960) American financier and philanthropist

I Believe

Vladimir Lenin photo
Keir Hardie photo

“Socialism does not propose to abolish land or capital. Only a genius could have thought of this as an objection to Socialism. Socialism proposes to abolish capitalism and landlordism.”

Keir Hardie (1856–1915) Scottish socialist and labour leader

Source: From Serfdom to Socialism (1907), p. 11

Laisenia Qarase photo

“We remain dedicated to accomplishing greater social justice through a fairer sharing of wealth and opportunity. We will stay the course, because it is right for Fiji.”

Laisenia Qarase (1941) Prime Minister of Fiji

Excerpts from an address to the Commonwealth Workshop in Nadi, 29 August 2005

Emma Watson photo
John Ralston Saul photo
Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo
Mark Satin photo

“James March, a Stanford-based social scientist… is much more a gurus’ guru than a guru to the general public. He finished second on the gurus’ gurus list and 48th on the original list.”

Thomas H. Davenport (1954) American academic

Laurence Prusak, Thomas H. Davenport, "Who Are the Gurus' Gurus," Harvard Business Review Survey, December 2003, p.14–16

Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo
H. G. Wells photo

“Kipps was unprepared for the unpleasant truth; that the path of social advancement is and must be strewn with broken friendships.”

H. G. Wells (1866–1946) English writer

Kipps the Story of a Simple Soul (1905) Bk. 2, ch. 5

Josip Broz Tito photo
Vanna Bonta photo

“The social value of a poem is proved not by marketing or reviews but by enduring resonance, a process that occurs as a response over time by humanity.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

The Cosmos as a Poem (2010)

Hassan Rouhani photo
Kate Upton photo

“In my opinion, the national anthem is a symbolic song about our country. It represents honoring the many brave men and women who sacrifice and have sacrificed their lives each and every single day to protect our freedom. Sitting or kneeling down during the national anthem is a disgrace to those people who have served and currently serve our country. Sitting down during the national anthem on September 11th is even more horrific. Protest all you want and use social media all you want. However, during the nearly two minutes when that song is playing, I believe everyone should put their hands on their heart and be proud of our country for we are all truly blessed. Recent history has shown that it is a place where anyone no matter what race or gender has the potential to become President of the United States. We live in the most special place in the world and should be thankful. After the song is over, I would encourage everyone to please use the podium they have, stand up for their beliefs, and make America a better place. The rebuilding of battery park and the freedom tower demonstrates that amazing things can be done in this country when we work together towards a common goal. It is a shame how quickly we have forgotten this as a society. Today we are more divided then ever before. I could never imagine multiple people sitting down during the national anthem on the September 11th anniversary. The lessons of 911 should teach us that if we come together, the world can be a better and more peaceful place #neverforget.”

Kate Upton (1992) American model and actress

Kate Upton on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/p/BKO8_ZGA87r/?taken-by=kateupton&hl=en (September 11, 2016)

Camille Paglia photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
John Horgan (journalist) photo
Tjalling Koopmans photo
Charles Cooley photo

“The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own.”

Charles Cooley (1864–1929) American sociologist

Source: Human Nature and the Social Order, 1902, p. 17

Richard Dawkins photo
Ervin László photo

“[ Technology is] the instrumentality for accessing and using free energies in human societies for human and social purposes.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Laszlo (1992) "Information Technology and Social Change: An Evolutionary Systems Analysis". Behavioral Science 37: pp.237-249; As cited in: K.L. Dennis (2003, p. 36).

Benjamin Ricketson Tucker photo
Wilhelm Liebknecht photo
Howard Bloom photo

“In our preoccupations with sex, our submission to gods and leaders, our sometimes suicidal commitment to ideas, religions, and trivial details of cultural style, we become the unconscious creators of the social organism's exploits.”

Howard Bloom (1943) American publicist and author

The Clint Eastwood Conundrum
The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History (1997)

Garry Kasparov photo
Manuel Castells photo
Herbert Marcuse photo

“Who is, in the classical conception, the subject that comprehends the ontological condition of truth and untruth? It is the master of pure contemplation (theoria), and the master of a practice guided by theoria, i. e., the philosopher-statesman. To be sure, the truth which he knows and expounds is potentially accessible to everyone. Led by the philosopher, the slave in Plato’s Meno is capable of grasping the truth of a geometrical axiom, i. e., a truth beyond change and corruption. But since truth is a state of Being as well as of thought, and since the latter is the expression and manifestation of the former, access to truth remains mere potentiality as long as it is not living in and with the truth. And this mode of existence is closed to the slave — and to anyone who has to spend his life procuring the necessities of life. Consequently, if men no longer had to spend their lives in the realm of necessity, truth and a true human existence would be in a strict and real sense universal. Philosophy envisages the equality of man but, at the same time, it submits to the factual denial of equality. For in the given reality, procurement of the necessities is the life-long job of the majority, and the necessities have to be procured and served so that truth (which is freedom from material necessities) can be. Here, the historical barrier arrests and distorts the quest for truth; the societal division of labor obtains the dignity of an ontological condition. If truth presupposes freedom from toil, and if this freedom is, in the social reality, the prerogative of a minority, then the reality allows such a truth only in approximation and for a privileged group. This state of affairs contradicts the universal character of truth, which defines and “prescribes” not only a theoretical goal, but the best life of man qua man, with respect to the essence of man. For philosophy, the contradiction is insoluble, or else it does not appear as a contradiction because it is the structure of the slave or serf society which this philosophy does not transcend. Thus it leaves history behind, unmastered, and elevates truth safely above the historical reality. There, truth is reserved intact, not as an achievement of heaven or in heaven, but as an achievement of thought — intact because its very notion expresses the insight that those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.”

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 128-130

Mokshagundam Visveshvaraya photo
Alan Charles Kors photo

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

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011)

Vikram Sarabhai photo

“Our national goals involve leap-frogging from a state of economic backwardness and social disabilities attempting to achieve in a few decades a change which has incidentally taken centuries in other countries and in other lands. This involves innovative at all levels.”

Vikram Sarabhai (1919–1971) (1919-1971), Indian physicist

In the post-Nehru era with his vision on “Television and Development” quoted in [Joshi, Puran Chandra, Communication and National Development, http://books.google.com/books?id=re46IrFLtQ8C&pg=PR25, 1 January 2002, Anamika Publishers & Distributors, 978-81-7975-013-1, xxv]page xxv.

Ba Jin photo
Shanna Moakler photo

“As long as I'm the director of Miss Nevada, we will never award fur coats as prizes, and I urge my fellow pageant directors to make the same pledge. Kind people today are taking a stand against cruelty to animals—so a fur coat is no prize for a compassionate, socially-aware woman.”

Shanna Moakler (1975) American actress and model

Statement to PETA, as quoted in "Miss USA Winners Pose Naked in Sexy New PETA Ad", E! Online (June 13, 2013) https://www.eonline.com/uk/news/429232/miss-usa-winners-pose-naked-in-sexy-new-peta-ad-check-it-out.

Russell Brand photo

“It’s six months since I did the interview with Jeremy Paxman that inspired this book, and British media today is awash with halfhearted condemnations of my observation that voting is pointless and my admission that I have never voted. My assertion that other people oughtn’t vote either was born of the same instinctive rejection of the mantle of appointed social prefect that prevents me from telling teenagers to “Just Say No” to drugs. I cannot confine my patronage to the circuitry of their minuscule wisdom. “People died so you’d have the right to vote.” No, they did not; they died for freedom. In the case where freedom was explicitly attached to the symbol of democratic rights, like female suffrage, I don’t imagine they’d’ve been so willing if they’d known how tokenistic voting was to become. Note too these martyrs did not achieve their ends by participating in a hollow, predefined ritual, the infertile dry hump of gestural democracy; they did it by direct action. Emily Davison, the hero of women’s suffrage, hurled herself in front of the king’s horses; she defied the tyranny that oppressed her and broke the boundaries that contained her. I imagine too that this woman would have had the rebellious perspicacity to understand that the system she was opposing would adjust to incorporate the female vote and deftly render it irrelevant. This woman, who left her job as a teacher to dedicate her life to activism, was imprisoned nine times. She used methods as severe and diverse as arson and hunger-striking to protest and at the time of her death would have been regarded as a terrorist.”

Revolution (2014)

Warren Farrell photo
Mark Hurd photo

“AI and its offshoot, machine learning, will be a foundational tool for creating social good as well as business success.”

Mark Hurd (1957–2019) American businessman, philanthropist and CEO of Oracle

LinkedIn article https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/prof-hawking-all-due-respect-ai-benefit-us-mark-v-hurd (27 December 2017)

Lars Løkke Rasmussen photo
Eric Hobsbawm photo
Benjamin N. Cardozo photo
George W. Bush photo
John Galsworthy photo
Dharampal photo

“There is a sense of widespread neglect and decay in the field of indigenous education within a few decades after the onset of British rule. (…) The conclusion that the decay noticed in the early 19th century and more so in subsequent decades originated with European supremacy in India, therefore, seems inescapable. The 1769-70 famine in Bengal (when, according to British record, one-third of the population actually perished), may be taken as a mere forerunner of what was to come. (…) During the latter part of the 19th century, impressions of decay, decline and deprivation began to agitate the mind of the Indian people. Such impressions no doubt resulted from concrete personal, parental and social experience of what had gone before. They were, perhaps, somewhat exaggerated at times. By 1900, it had become general Indian belief that the country had been decimated by British rule in all possible ways; that not only had it become impoverished, but it had been degraded to the furthest possible extent; that the people of India had been cheated of most of what they had; that their customs and manners were ridiculed, and that the infrastructure of their society mostly eroded. One of the statements which thus came up was that the ignorance and illiteracy in India was caused by British rule; and, conversely, that at the beginning of British political dominance, India had had extensive education, learning and literacy. By 1930, much had been written on this point in the same manner as had been written on the deliberate destruction of Indian crafts and industry, and the impoverishment of the Indian countryside.”

Dharampal (1922–2006) Indian historian

Dharmapal: The Beautiful Tree, Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century. (1983)

Harold L. Ickes photo
H.L. Mencken photo
Howard Scott photo
John Hirst photo

“Much of what now passes for social science is concerned not to explain human differences but to explain them away.”

John Hirst (1942–2016) Australian historian

Sense and Nonsense in Australian History (2005)

John Adams photo

“There is, in the human Breast, a social Affection, which extends to our whole Species.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

Letter to Abigail Adams http://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2785&context=cklawreview (19 October 1775). Reprinted in I ADAMS FAMILY CORRESPONDENCE 318 (L. Butterfield ed. 1963).
1770s

Donald A. Norman photo

“Once an activity has been socialized, it is impossible to point out, by concrete example, how men in a free market could better conduct it. How, for instance, can one compare a socialized post office with private postal delivery when the latter has been outlawed?”

Leonard E. Read (1898–1983) American academic

Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism https://books.google.com/books?id=W3MuCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT25&dq=Once+an+activity+has+been+socialized,+it+is+impossible+to+point+out,+by+concrete+example,+how+men+in+a+free+market+could+better+conduct+it.+How,+for+instance,+can+one+compare+a+socialized+post+office+with+private+postal+delivery+when+the+latter+has+been+outlawed?&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwilwZqz9PLTAhXGOyYKHSjJCk8Q6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q=Once%20an%20activity%20has%20been%20socialized%2C%20it%20is%20impossible%20to%20point%20out%2C%20by%20concrete%20example%2C%20how%20men%20in%20a%20free%20market%20could%20better%20conduct%20it.%20How%2C%20for%20instance%2C%20can%20one%20compare%20a%20socialized%20post%20office%20with%20private%20postal%20delivery%20when%20the%20latter%20has%20been%20outlawed%3F&f=false
Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism

Thomas Flanagan (political scientist) photo

“Ever since Comte first set the agenda of social science, his megalomania lingers on in sociology, political science, and other disciplines.”

Thomas Flanagan (political scientist) (1944) author, academic, and political activist

Source: Game Theory and Canadian Politics (1998), Chapter 1, Rational Choice, p. 19.