Communism Quotes

It [Communism] is not new. It is, in fact, man's second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: "Ye shall be as gods." It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man's relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God.
It is the vision of man's mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man's liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man's destiny and reorganizing man's life and the world. It is the vision of man, once more the central figure of the Creation, not because God made man in his image, but because man's mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals. Copernicus and his successors displaced man as the central fact of the universe by proving that the earth was not the central star of the universe. Communism restores man to his sovereignty by the simple method of denying God. ~ Whittaker Chambers

My sympathies are, of course, with the Government side, especially the Anarchists ; for Anarchism seems to me more likely to lead to desirable social change than highly centralized, dictatorial Communism . ~ Aldous Huxley

About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The fall of the present bureaucratic dictatorship [in the Soviet Union], if it were not replaced by a new socialist power, would thus mean a return to capitalist relations with a catastrophic decline of industry and culture. ~ Leon Trotsky

I wonder how many such men in America would know that Communism, the New Deal, Fascism, Nazism, are merely so-many trade-names for collectivist Statism, like the trade-names for tooth-pastes which are all exactly alike except for the flavouring. ~ Albert Jay Nock

One question that people always ask at home is never asked here: "What happened to Communism in Russia?" Everybody yawns when a visitor brings it up, because the answer is so obvious to every Russian. The answer is that there never was Communism in Russia; there were only communists. ~ Arthur Koestler

To congratulate oneself on one's warm commitment to the environment, or to peace, or to the oppressed, and think no more is a profound moral fault. ~ Robert Conquest

The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda. ~ Martin Buber

Two decades after communism and the alleged end of the Cold War, Russia is still a cash economy. The preferred currency is dollars, though euros are also acceptable. ~ Luke Harding

As a result, socialism and communism, in particular, use government to suppress religion to such a degree as to leave the one true God out entirely. ~ Tony Evans

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners. ~ Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Communists are the last optimists. ~ Nadine Gordimer

Communism is not a political party nor a political plan under the Constitution; it is a system of government that is the opposite of our Constitutional government, and it would be necessary to destroy our government before Communism could be set up in the United States ... [Communism] even reaches its hand into the sanctity of the family circle itself, disrupting the normal relationship of parent and child, all in a manner unknown and unsanctioned under the Constitutional guarantees under which we in America live. ~ David O. McKay

When Communism fell in 1989, the temptation for Western commentators to gloat triumphantly proved irresistible. This, it was declared, marked the end of History. Henceforth, the world belonged to liberal capitalism – there was no alternative – and we would all march forward in unison towards a future shaped by peace, democracy and free markets. Twenty years on this assertion looks threadbare.

There can be no question that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the domino-like collapse of Communism states from the suburbs of Vienna to the shores of the Pacific marked a very significant transition: one in which millions of men and women were liberated from a dismal and defunct ideology and its authoritarian institutions. But no one could credibly assert that what replaced Communism was an era of idyllic tranquility. There was no peace in post-Communist Yugoslavia, and precious little democracy in any of the successor states of the Soviet Union.

As for free markets, they surely flourished, but it is not clear for whom. The West – Europe and the United States above all – missed a once-in-a-century opportunity to re-shape the world around agreed and improved international institutions and practices. Instead, we sat back and congratulated ourselves upon having won the Cold War: a sure way to lose the peace. The years from 1989 to 2009 were consumed by locusts. ~ Tony Judt

I came into the Agency with a set of ideas and attitudes that were quite typical of people coming into the Agency at that time. You could call it liberal anti-communism. ~ Aldrich Ames

If Communism was liberalism in a hurry, liberalism is Communism in slow motion. ~ Joseph Sobran

The peasant rebellion against collectivization was the most serious episode in popular resistance experienced by the Soviet state after the Russian Civil War. In 1930, more than two million peasants took part in 13,754 mass disturbances. In 1929 and 1930, the OGPU recorded 22,887 "terrorists acts" aimed at local officials and peasant activists, more than 1,100 murders. ~ Lynne Viola

The evolution toward Communism is inevitable. ~ Charles De Gaulle

You can't get good chinese takeout in China and cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba. That's all you need to know about communism. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

It wasn't true, the evidence was faked, but the odd thing is that, whether it s true or not, the consequences are the same: one large group of human beings
or another turned out to be triple-distilled sons-of-bitches, which proves that we all have it in us. Whether the Communists staged a diabolical lie or the Americans sowed plague in China, the one thing that matters is that, as a man, you're
in the gutter. Colonel Babcock. [...] Maybe the West is a civilization, but the Communists are an ugly truth about man. Don't accuse them of inhuman methods: everything about them is human. We're all one great, lovely zoological family, and we shouldn't forget it. That's how you came to be in the gutter Colonel and it's no use your taking refuge on an island and behaving like an ostrich - being English, I mean; the gutter is there, it's you, or rather in you; it flows in your veins. ~ Romain Gary

Most every charge you level at American capitalism applies with equal force to communism, with this nice difference, that the Reds make no pretense at such frivolities as civil liberties or environmentalism. The differences in degree are so great that they result in a radical difference in kind. ~ Edward Abbey

Either communism must die or Christianity must die because it's actually a battle between Christ and Anti-Christ. ~ Billy Graham

I am political in spite of myself. I don't want to do the things I know I have to do, don't want to expose myself to disapproval, to retribution, don't want to go to meetings and demonstrations, distribute leaflets, don't want to ask people for signatures, for money.

I don't do these things as naturally as I breathe, the way I imagine real political people do, real communists, real socialists and feminists, real radicals, real troublemakers, real champions of the people. I do them because I know I've got to, because I am convinced it's the only way to make changes, to stop abuses. I do them almost as a last resort. I do them because I've been putting off doing them, avoiding them for months, because finally the necessity has gripped me and overcome my reluctance, my desire for the warmth of my room, for my books, for my people, for the reassurance of my homely habits. ~ Rosario Morales

Equality cannot be imagined outside of tyranny. ~ Charles Forbes Rene De Montalembert

Are you a communist?"
"No I am an anti-fascist"
"For a long time?"
"Since I have understood fascism. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Saving a species of bird or insect is no different from saving humankind. 'All lives are equal' is the basic tenet of Pan-Species Communism. ~ Liu Cixin

Communism to me is one-third practice and two-thirds explanation. ~ Will Rogers

The objection to a Communist always resolves itself into the fact that he is not a gentleman. ~ H.L. Mencken

The Soviet Union attempted to export communism to the entire world. We know what came of that. Now the West is trying to export democracy, including to regions where there is no traditional foundation for it. That cannot end well. ~ Vladimir Yakunin

Libertarianism and communism are equally crazy in opposite ways. Libertarians believe that it is possible to privatize everything without anarchy, while communists believe that it is possible to socialize everything without tyranny. ~ Michael Lind

This may read like a mad journey through some of the most dangerous places on earth, but it is much more than that as well. Sheets witnessed most of the wars, disasters, and revolutions that followed the end of communism, and his accounts of them
from Chechnya to Chernobyl, and from Abkhazia to Afghanistan
serve as a passionate but considered obituary for the vanished Soviet empire. ~ Oliver Bullough

When someone asked me what communism was, i opened my mouth to answer, then realized i didn't have the faintest idea. My image of a communist came from a cartoon. It was a spy with a black trench coat and a black hat pulled down over his face, slinking around corners. In school, we were taught that communists worked in salt mines, that they weren't free, that everybody wore the same clothes, and that no one owned anything. ~ Assata Shakur

If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

Communism is inequality, but not as property is. Property is exploitation of the weak by the strong. Communism is exploitation of the strong by the weak. ~ Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

It is one of history's ironies that Communism, advertised as a classless society, tended to breed a privileged class of feudal proportions. ~ Henry Kissinger

Ruth and I often share the stories that we have heard and the things that we have learned to help the western church and many of its congregations grasp a new, and perhaps more biblical, perspective on suffering and persecution in our faith. We share often about how suffering and persecution relate to our faith. We desperately want our western brothers and sisters in Christ to realize that the greatest enemy of our faith today is not communism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Atheism, or even Islam. Our greatest enemy is lostness. Lostness is the terrible enemy that Jesus commissioned His followers to vanquish with the battle strategy that He spelled out for them in Matthew 28:18-20. He was addressing this same enemy when He plainly clarified His purpose in coming: 'I have come to seek and to save those who are lost.' Our hope is that believers around the world will get close enough to the heart of God that the first images that come to mind when we heard the word 'Muslim' are not Somali pirates or suicide bombers or violent jihadists or even terrorists. When we hear the word 'Muslim,' we need to see and think of each and every individual Muslim as a lost person who is loved by God. We need to see each Muslim as a person in need of God's grace and forgiveness. We need to see each Muslim as someone for whom Christ died. ~ Nik Ripken

When historians consider the significance of the Berlin crises of the mid-20th century, I do not believe that they will record it as an incident in the encirclement of freedom. The true view, in my judgment, will be to see it rather as a major episode in the recession of communism. ~ Robert Kennedy

We may first observe that communism and socialism
which we shall hereafter group together and dub Statism
cannot live with Christianity nor with any religion that postulates a Creator such as the Declaration of Independence recognizes. The slaves of Statism must know no power, no authority, no source of blessing, no God, but the State ... ~ J. Reuben Clark

Despite Soviet 'defeat' in 1991, the ideas associated with Communism remain shockingly reputable throughout what we still know as the Free World. ~ Diana West

We have conquered everything, and everything has slipped out of our grasp. ~ Victor Serge

Indeed, if communist central planners could have organized the economy with as much detail, precision, and flexibility as a modern-day Toyota or Wal-Mart, communism would probably still exist. ~ Jim Stanford

Governments harangue about deficits to get more revenue so they can spend more. ~ Allan H. Meltzer

In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy. ~ Fran Lebowitz

In capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will for the first time create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority. ~ Vladimir Lenin

The effort of building an ideal society always leads to violence, often to very extensive violence. Because, whether we like it or not, it is not possible to create an ideal society with imperfect people. And this, unfortunately, we are. So the main purpose for Nazism as well as for Communism was to create a 'new person'. In order to make room for it, the world needed to be rid of its non-perfect models. ~ Mart Laar

Communism is like prohibition, it is a good idea, but it won't work. ~ Will Rogers

Who is the true friend of the people? Fascism is. Who has done the most for the working man? The USSR or Hitler? Hitler has ... Who has done the most for the small businessman? Not Thorez but Hitler! ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

It is not to save capitalism that we fight in Russia ... It is for a revolution of our own. ... If Europe were to become once more the Europe of bankers, of fat corrupt bourgeoisies we should prefer Communism to win and destroy everything. We would rather have it all blow up than see this rottenness resplendent. Europe fights in Russia because it [i.e., Fascist Europe] is Socialist. what interests us most in the war is the revolution to follow The war cannot end without the triumph of Socialist revolution. ~ Leon Degrelle

Many young athletes joined the gangs instead of aspiring to gold medals in the Olympics. You could easily discern the kind of sport they did by their body shape and injuries.
Well-built with a broken nose - a boxer.
Broad shoulders with torn ears - a wrestler.
Enormous muscles with little to no brain - a bodybuilder.
Short with broad shoulders and a quadratic head - a weightlifter. ~ Carlito Sofer, Nik Krasno

The first duty of a man is to think for himself ~ Jose Marti

Make criticism in good time; don't get into the habit of criticizing only after the event. ~ Mao Tse-tung

Grandpa Martin Vanderhoff: Penny, why don't you write a play about Ism-Mania?
Penny Sycamore: Ism-Mania?
Grandpa Martin Vanderhoff: Yeah, sure, you know, Communism, Faschism, Voodoo-ism, everybody's got an -ism these days.
Penny Sycamore: Oh
[laughs]
Penny Sycamore: I thought it was some kind of itch or something.
Grandpa Martin Vanderhoff: Well, it's just as catching. When things go a little bad nowadays, you go out, get yourself an -ism and you're in business. ~ George S. Kaufman

Capitalism , as Marx defined it, is a system in which productive wealth is privately owned. Communism (which Marx proposed as an alternative) is one in which productive wealth is owned by the community, or by the nation on behalf of the people. ~ Richard Heinberg

Today the whole world depends on communism for its salvation, and China is no exception. ~ Mao Zedong

Marx himself wrote that capitalism produces above all its own gravediggers. Do you think that perhaps he wasn't talking about capitalism? ~ Paullina Simons

Technology helped end communism by bringing in information from the outside. ~ Lech Walesa

If you depart from moral absolutes, you go into a bottomless pit. Communism and Nazism were catastrophic evils which both derived from moral relativism. Their differences were minor compared to their similarities. ~ Paul Johnson

By the time I turned fifteen, Communism had become my religion. ~ Ella Leya

Communism will kill you quicker than a maraschino cherry ever will. ~ Stephan Eirik Clark

It is only through religion that communism can be achieved, and has been achieved over and over. ~ Dorothy Day

He had understood long ago that the past was no better than the present. That was as plain as day. One had to try to escape, to wrestle free from every era, so as not to be devoured by it. ~ Lyudmila Ulitskaya

Communism...muat of necessity be a saddening process for anyone who has ever tasted the intellectual pleasures of the world we live in. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I was the true future. I understood Communism better than they did. ~ Elia Kazan

I have always been and will be an enemy of communism, but I love all people. ~ Lech Walesa

There were people who believed their opportunities to live a fulfilled life were hampered by the number of Asians in England, by the existance of a royal family, by the volume of traffic that passed by their house, by the malice of trade unions, by the power of callous employers, by the refusal of the health service to take their condition seriously, by communism, by capitalism, by atheism, by anything, in fact, but their own futile, weak-minded failure to get a fucking grip. ~ Stephen Fry

Communism is fascism with a human face. ~ Susan Sontag

Capitalism works. In the end, socialism imploded on itself. Communism imploded on itself. Ultimately jihadism will implode on itself, if we stay in the fight and stay on offense because failed philosophies don't work, there's no future. ~ Roger Ailes

What was wrong with communism wasn't aberrant leadership, it was communism. ~ William F. Buckley, Jr.

The best job to get was as a doctor, at $45,000 a year. The worst was a teacher, at $17,000. If there was any disparity in salary between players, the game was over at the beginning: it didn't take an extra eye to see that a doctor could whoop ass on a teacher. So we massaged the rules a bit: Why not both be doctors? How easy! How fair! That way whoever won did so by a slim margin of money and/or plastic children pegs in the car-shaped game pieces. Little did we know we'd reinvented Communism ~ Audrey Meier DeKam

To paraphrase what the President of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev said on American TV in 1953, "You Americans are so gullible! No, you won't accept Communism outright. But we'll keep feeding you small doses of Socialism until you finally wake up and find you already have Communism. We won't have to fight you. We'll so weaken your economy until you fall like over-ripe fruit into our hand. ~ D. Jonathan Scott

Communism is the corruption of a dream of justice. ~ Adlai E. Stevenson

It is only the ending of capitalism, colonialism, imperialism and neocolonialism and the attainment of world communism that can provide the conditions under which the RACE question can finally be abolished and eliminated. ~ Kwame Nkrumah

Seventy years of communism had destroyed the work ethic of an entire nation. Millions of Russians had been sent to the gulags for showing the slightest hint of personal initiative. The Soviets severely penalized independent thinkers, so the natural self-preservation reaction was to do as little as possible and hope that nobody would notice you. ~ Bill Browder

A hand gets way cleaner from washing, not itself, but the other hand. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

If you look at the fact that the best chance we have for a good economy is the private sector. The government cannot create jobs. If the government could create jobs, then Communism would have worked. But didn't work. So what we have to do is allow the private sector and the entrepreneurial spirit to lead us back to a job-filled recovery. ~ Tim Scott

Occult Theft,
Theft which hides itself even from itself, and is legal, respectable, and cowardly,
corrupts the body and soul of man, to the last fibre of them. And the guilty Thieves of Europe, the real sources of all deadly war in it, are the Capitalists ~ John Ruskin

These were eye-opening years for me. When I'd come back to Warner Brothers after the war, I'd shared the orthodox liberal view that Communists - if there really were any - were liberals who were temporarily off track, and whatever they were, they didn't pose much of a threat to me or anyone. I heard whispers that Moscow wanted to infiltrate the world's most powerful medium of entertainment, but I'd passed them off as irrational and emotional red baiting. Now I knew from firsthand experience how Communists used lies, deceit, violence, or any other tactic that suited them to advance the cause of Soviet expansionism. I knew from the experience of hand-to-hand combat that America faced no more insidious or evil threat than that of Communism. ~ Ronald Reagan

Here's your first problem," he said, pointing at a sentence. "'Religion is the opium of the people.' Well, I don't know about people, but I think you'll find that the opium of pirates is actual opium. ~ Gideon Defoe

I just happen to know quite a lot of what happened in Czechoslovakia between 1968 and the fall of Communism. ~ Tom Stoppard

And believe me, there is nobody who hates Communism more than a former Communist. ~ Robert D. Kaplan

Those of us who lived under communism for most of our lives were looking toward the Western world because of its values, emphasis on democracy, individual liberties and freedom, and economic prosperity. ~ Vaclav Klaus

I was shocked to have to admit to myself that not only had I accepted a complex theory somewhat uncritically, but that I had also actually noticed quite a bit of what was wrong, in the theory as well as in the practice of communism. But I had repressed this -partly out of loyalty to my friends, partly out of loyalty to "the cause", and partly because there is a mechanism of getting oneself more and more deeply involved: once one has sacrificed one's intellectual conscience over a minor point one doesn't wish to give in too easily; one wishes to justify the self-sacrifice by convincing oneself of the fundamental goodness of the cause, which is seen to outweigh any little moral or intellectual compromise that maybe required. With every such moral or intellectual sacrifice one gets more deeply involved. One becomes ready to back one's moral or intellectual investments in the cause with further investments. It's like being eager to throw good money after bad. ~ Karl R. Popper

The boycott of parliamentary institutions on the part of anarchists and semianarchists is dictated by a desire not to submit their weakness to a test on the part of the masses, thus preserving their right to an inactive hauteur which makes no difference to anybody. A revolutionary party can turn its back to a parliament only if it has set itself the immediate task of overthrowing the existing regime. ~ Leon Trotsky

At bottom, I mean profoundly at bottom, the FBI has nothing to do with Communism, it has nothing to do with catching criminals, it has nothing to do with the Mafia, the syndicate, it has nothing to do with trust-busting, it has nothing to do with interstate commerce, it has nothing to do with anything but serving as a church for the mediocre. A high church for the true mediocre. ~ Norman Mailer

The real issue behind these people who are gun grabbers, the truth is - based on fact - the reason why is, they want control. They want control of the people. That's what socialism is and communism. ~ Luke Scott

I remembered Papa talking about Stalin confiscating peasants' land, tools, and animals. He told them what crops they would produce and how much they would be paid. I thought it was ridiculous. How could Stalin simply take something that didn't belong to him, something that a farmer and his family had worked their whole lives for? "That's communism, Lina," Papa had said. ~ Ruta Sepetys

It was partly the war, the revolution did the rest. The war was an artificial break in life
as if life could be put off for a time
what nonsense! The revolution broke out willy-nilly like a sigh suppressed too long. Everyone was revived, reborn, changed, transformed. You might say that everyone has been through two revolutions
his own, personal revolution as well as the general one. It seems to me that socialism is the sea, and all these separate streams, these private, individual revolutions, are flowing into it
the sea of life, the sea of spontaneity. I said life, but I mean life as you see it in a great picture, transformed by genius, creatively enriched. Only now people have decided to experience it not in books and pictures, but in themselves, not as an abstraction but in practice. ~ Boris Pasternak

See you either in hell or in communism ~ Slavoj Zizek

I lived in a kind of dream of communism. ~ Bernardo Bertolucci

Even under the most perfect Social Democracy we should, without Communism, still be living like hogs, except that each hog would get his fair share of grub ... Whilst we are hogs, let us at least be well-fed, healthy, reciprocally useful hogs, instead of
well, instead of the sort we are at present. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Churchmen are quick to defend religious freedom; lawyers were never so universally aroused as by President Roosevelt's Court bill; newspapers are most alert to civil liberties when there is a hint of press censorship in the air. And educators become perturbed at every effort to curb academic freedom. But too seldom do all of these become militant when ostensibly the rights of only one group are threatened. They do not always react to the truism that when the rights of any individual or group are chipped away, the freedom of all erodes. ~ Earl Warren

American foreign policy had still not recovered from its victory over communism when George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice took over at the White House in 2001. ~ Russell Baker

If you personally advocate that I be caged if I don't pay for whatever "government" things YOU want, please don't pretend to be tolerant, or non-violent, or enlightened, or compassionate. Don't pretend you believe in "live and let live," and don't pretend you want peace, freedom or harmony. It's a simple truism that the only people in the world who are willing to "live and let live" are voluntaryists. So you can either PRETEND to care about and respect your fellow man while continuing to advocate widespread authoritarian violence, or you can embrace the concepts of self-ownership and peaceful coexistence, and become an anarchist. ~ Larken Rose

Nothing in our lifetimes has been more heartening than when people of the former Soviet Union and Central Europe broke the grip of communism. We have aided their progress and I am proud of it. ~ William J. Clinton

If we do not stop these mar-makers not,...it will soon be too late. We are the only nation that can halt this crusade. It might be too late in America, but it isn't too late here. Without British support the whole scheme would collapse. For that reason the future of all nations depends upon the policy which is decided in this House. More than that, the final position of Britain in the world is being decided. If we support these anti-Communist crusades through the world as we have supported it in Greece, then our good name and existence will be threatened by the hatred of all free-thinking men. We cannot suppress all desire in Europe and Asia for social change by branding it communism from Russia and persecuting its supporters. Social change doesn't have to come from Russia, whatever the Foreign Office or the Americans say. It is a product of the miserable conditions under which the majority of the earth's population exist. There are fighters for social change in every land, here as well as anywhere.... We Socialists are among them. That is the reason for our predominance in the House to-day. The very men that we try to suppress in other countries are asking for far less liberty than we enjoy here, far less social change than we Socialists hope to initiate in Great Britain. Are we going to betray these men by labelling them Communists and crushing them wherever we find them until we have launched ourselves at Russia herself in a war that will wipe this island off the face of t ~ James Aldridge

Personel selection is decisive. People are our most valuable capital. ~ Joseph Stalin

Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Although one of the key justifications for the Vietnam war was to prevent the spread of communism, the U.S. defeat was to produce nothing of the kind: apart from the fact that Cambodia and Laos became embroiled, the effects were essentially confined to Vietnam. ~ Martin Jacques

I'm opposed to the notion of official ideology--not just fascism, Communism, Baathism, but the fluffier ones, too, like 'multiculturalism' and 'climate change' and 'marriage equality.' Because the more topics you rule out of discussion--immigration, Islam, 'gender fluidity'--the more you delegitimize the political system. ~ Mark Steyn

But I,
from poetry's skies,
plunge into communism,
because
without it
I feel no love. ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky