The Communist Manifesto Quotes

It might also have helped their cause. Perhaps it is a sign of how eternal Britons once considered their absurd class distinctions that they were comfortable with such mixing. Nonetheless, it was positive - as that devotee of the Cheshire Hounds, Friedrich Engels, appreciated. The author of the "Communist Manifesto" of 1848 considered fox-hunting "the greatest physical pleasure I know", the apogee of English culture and, less convincingly, a source of useful ideas for managing the revolution. What lessons should be drawn from this farrago? The obvious one is that politicians make the laws they deserve. Ill-conceived and illogical, the ban is unworkable. It allows hunts to follow an artificial scent-trail - because an outright ban could criminalise anyone taking his pet dog for a walk in the country. And because it would not be illegal for that pooch to ~ Anonymous

The Communist Manifesto condemned the bourgeoisie not only for pauperizing, dehumanizing, and enslaving the toiling masses, but also for robbing the intellectual of his elevated status. "The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe." Though the movement was initiated by intellectuals and powered by their talents and hungers, it yet held up the proletariat as the chosen people - the only carrier of the revolutionary idea, and the chief beneficiary of the revolution to come. The intellectuals, particularly those who had "raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole," were to act as guides - as a composite Moses - during the long wanderings in the desert. Like Moses, the intellectuals would have no more to do once the promised land was in sight. "The role of the intelligentsia," said Lenin, "is to make special leaders from among the intelligentsia unnecessary. ~ Eric Hoffer

Um. I feel the color in my cheeks rising again. I must be the color of The Communist Manifesto. Stop talking. Stop talking NOW. ~ E.L. James

In one way or another, these fears echoed the beliefs of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who argued in The Communist Manifesto (1848) that governments in capitalist society were political extensions of the interests of business owners. "The executive of the state," they wrote, was "nothing more than a committee for managing the affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."25 Over the following decades, scores of influential followers would advance various arguments that had in common a core theme. Marxists argued that the expansion of capitalism brought with it the reinforcement of class divisions and, through imperialism and the spread of finance capital around the world, the replication of these divisions both within countries and between them. ~ Moises Naim

I feel the color in my cheeks rising again. I must be the color of The Communist Manifesto. ~ E.L. James

The Communist Manifesto as political rhetoric has an almost biblical force. ~ Eric Hobsbawm

Books can be immensely powerful. The ideas in them can change the way people think. Yet it was the Nazis and Stalin's officers who committed terrible crimes, and not Mein Kampf or the Communist Manifesto - and of course, the Manifesto contained many key ideas that are still relevant and important today, long after Stalin has gone. There is a crucial distinction between the book and its effect - it's crucial because if you talk about a book being harmful rather than its effect you begin to legitimise censorship. Abhorrent ideas need to be challenged by better ones, not banned. ~ John Farndon

Most people who read "The Communist Manifesto" probably have no idea that it was written by a couple of young men who had never worked a day in their lives, and who nevertheless spoke boldly in the name of "the workers". Thomas Sowell . ~ Thomas Sowell

The so-called 'materialistic conception of history,' with the crude elements of genius of the early form which appeared, for instance, in the 'Communist Manifesto,' still prevails only in the minds of laymen and dilettantes. ~ Max Weber

I don't like the income tax. Every time we talk about these taxes we get around to the idea of 'from each according to his capacity and to each according to his needs'. That's socialism. It's written into the Communist Manifesto. Maybe we ought to see that every person who gets a tax return receives a copy of the Communist Manifesto with it so he can see what's happening to him. ~ T. Coleman Andrews

Study of the past often turns into love of the past and a desire to keep it. ~ A.J.P. Taylor

It's much easier to wear a Chairman Mao button and shake your fists in the air and all that, then to actually read the Communist manifesto and things like that and actually become involved in politics. ~ Lester Bangs

1849 - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels present, The Communist Manifesto, declaring "the abolition of private property. ~ Brian Sussman

The main difference between the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution was that the former was mostly the work of Communist party members and others who wanted to bring about 'socialism with a human face.' ~ Adam Michnik

Look."
The others seemed confused. Then the glow became brighter: a holographic golden sickle with a few sheaves of wheat, rotating just above Meg McCaffrey.
A boy in the crowd gasped. "She's a communist!"
A girl who'd been sitting at Cabin Four's table gave him a disgusted sneer. "No, Damien, that's my mom's symbol." Her face went slack as the truth sank in. "Uh, which means ... it's her mom's symbol. ~ Rick Riordan

He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights ... it had to be some silly little Communist. ~ Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

My father, Charles Seeger, got me into the Communist movement. He backed out around '38. I drifted out in the 50's. ~ Pete Seeger

Of course people don't want war. Why should a poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best thing he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? ~ Hermann Goring

Of course, I grew up in Communist Romania, but I am happy to say that now our country is democratic, and prospering, since the revolution in 1989. ~ Nadia Comaneci

The real evil of the Russian communist state is not communism. It is the secret police and the concentration camp. ~ John Boyd Orr

Why leave a country when you're on top? Whether it was another communist scare or the even greener pastures in America, no one ever gives me a straight answer. (The only thing anyone can agree on is that they still miss the island.) ~ Eddie Huang

According to old frineds who grew up with Stanley Ann Dunham, she became a serious student of Communist and Marxist theories back in high school. One profile even named a few of her radical teachers and administrators at Mercer High, which Dunham attended, whose classrooms formed part of what was called "anarchy alley." What sounds strange is that this avante-garde, supposedly idealistic communist-thinking student of the left met a major oil company executive during the radical 1960s, and not only found him not to be a repulsively evil money-grubbing capitalist pig, but was so taken in by his Big Oil company/military charm that she married him.
Okay, so maybe that's not coincidence. Maybe that's just the power of love. ~ Mondo Frazier

Ms. Lessing points to a current dogma: political correctness. "It's a continuation of the old Communist Party. It is! The same words, the same attitudes ... 'the Communist Party has made a decision and this is the line."
At first, she says, political correctness had a good beginning; she remembers saying that the language that we use is sexist, racist and so on. But then, "that became a dogma. Because we love a dogma,you know, we really do. We can never just let things develop easily from an idea, it seems to me there's always a group of fanatics who grasp it and make it a dogma. ~ Doris Lessing

Overriding all of them, however, was the memory of 1918, the belief that the Jews, wherever and whoever they might be, threatened to undermine the German war effort, by engaging in subversion, partisan activities, Communist resistance movements and much else besides. ~ Richard J. Evans

The Chinese Communist Party has seen fit to protect most property rights because it recognizes that it has a self-interest in doing so. But the party faces no legal constraints other than its own internal political controls if it decides to violate property rights. Many peasants find their land coveted by municipal authorities and developers who want to turn it into commercial real estate, high-density housing, shopping centers, and the like, or else into public infrastructure like roads, dams, or government offices. There are large incentives for developers to work together with corrupt local officials to illegally take land away from peasants or urban homeowners, and such takings have been perhaps the largest single source of social discontent in contemporary China.33 ~ Francis Fukuyama

You have read and heard that communist theory-the science of communism created in the main by Marx, this doctrine of Marxism-has ceased to be the work of a single socialist of the nineteenth century, even though he was a genius, and that it has become the doctrine of millions and tens of millions of proletarians all over the world, who are applying it in their struggle against capitalism. ~ Vladimir Lenin

Like many Eastern European gangsters, he had been an official in the state security apparatus until the Communist regime collapsed. ~ Massimo Carlotto

Of course, mankind would not have landed on the Moon in 1969, were it not for two things: conquered Nazi rocket technology and post-war anti-Communist paranoia in the United States. ~ Charles Duke

There are no habits of man more alien to the doctrine of the Communist than those of the collector ~ Augustine Birrell

The Communist Party is very popular in South Africa, especially among the young people. Never having had a chance to travel, and having suffered so much under capitalism, they still can't believe that the Russian people themselves have rejected it. ~ Nadine Gordimer

It's high time that Christians made up their minds to do something ... What are we going to show in the way of resistance-as compared to the Communists, for instance-when all this terror is over? We will be standing empty-handed. We will have no answer when we are asked: What did you do about it? ~ Hans Scholl

It seems to be that when these communist regimes take over - if you look at the example of Vietnam or Cambodia or Nicaragua - that even in conditions of peace they don't seem to be able to figure out how to support their people, and the human suffering is enormous. ~ John Negroponte

The Rosenberg case had been orchestrated to an anti-Communist frenzy that matched the exuberant hysteria of the Nazi horror. ~ Howard Fast

True that Benjamin used a communist language in the last years of his life, so he looks different to us now. But that's because he died in 1940. Those last years were the ones in which communist language regained authority--seen as necessary to fight fascism (identified as The Enemy). Had Benjamin lived as long as Adorno he would have become as a-social, as disillusioned with left as Adorno did. ~ Susan Sontag

Trying to create an overly flattened society inevitably and unintentionally creates new centers of power. A revolution might dethrone the old rich, but only at the expense of empaneling an unchallenged communist party, along with a politburo and legions of clever schemers and ass kissers who turn into a new privileged class. The right way to deal with concentrations of power is not to try to vaporize them, but to balance them. ~ Jaron Lanier

I became a Communist because I fell in love with a man who was a Red and entered the Army to take care of the Fascists, and I knew it would please him if I became one. ~ Karen Morley

The word "collective" is not so often used because it has been basically used by socialists and communists and has a different history. The word "cooperative" means the workplace itself is organized cooperatively, rather than in the conventional capitalistic, hierarchical form. ~ Richard D. Wolff

Up close the city constitutes an oppressive series of staircases, but from a distance it inspires fantasies of wealth and power so profound that even our communists are temporarily rendered speechless. ~ David Sedaris

I dispute the right of conservatives to be automatically complacent on these points. My own Marxist group took a consistently anti-Moscow line throughout the 'Cold War,' and was firm in its belief that that Soviet Union and its European empire could not last. Very few people believed that this was the case: The best known anti-Communist to advance the proposition was the great Robert Conquest, but he himself insists that part of the credit for such prescience goes to Orwell. More recently, a very exact prefiguration of the collapse of the USSR was offered by two German Marxists, one of them from the West (Hans Magnus Enzensberger) and one from the East (Rudolf Bahro, the accuracy of whose prediction was almost uncanny). I have never met an American conservative who has even heard of, let alone read, either of these authors. ~ Christopher Hitchens

The recent experience of totalitarianism in Europe was foreshadowed at the French Revolution, when the Committee of Public Safety acted in the same way as the Nazi and Communist parties, setting up 'parallel structures' through which to control the state and to exert a micromanagerial tyranny over every aspect of civil society.
Let us at least be realistic, and recognize that, if totalitarian governments have arisen and spread with such rapidity in modern times, this is because there is something in human nature to which they correspond and on which they draw for their moral energy. ~ Roger Scruton

The Roman Empire controlled the world because it could build roads ... the British Empire was dominant because it had ships. In the air age we were powerful because we had airplaines. Now the Communists have established a foothold in outer space. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives. ~ Doris Lessing

If you understood what communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees that we would some day become communist ... I, a socialist, think that we should strive toward a socialist society, all the way to communism. ~ Jane Fonda

There was a Russian director named Elem Klimov, who did his films during the communist days. They were constantly struggling with the authorities and to be allowed to express themselves. But he did one of the best war movies I've ever seen - it's called 'Come and See.' ~ Stellan Skarsgard

Books are constantly changing the world. If you're a Christian, you have been changed by the Bible, by the word of God, or what was left of it when it was finally wrung through the hands of men. If you are a Muslim, look to the Koran; if a Communist, to Marx and Engels. Don't you see? This world is constantly being altered by books. ~ John Connolly

During the Cold War between the democratic West and the Soviet Union, there were, of course, many in the West who said, 'Better dead than Red [communist]'; but many others subscribed to the slogan associated with Bertrand Russell, the twentieth century's leading atheist philosopher: 'Better Red than dead.' Russell's slogan was consistent with that of much of the well-educated class in Britain. On February 8, 1933, right after Hitler came to power in Germany, the Oxford Union Debating Society held a debate on the resolution, 'This House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.' The resolution passed 275–153. The vote made an impression on Hitler and Mussolini, as it revealed that many of England's best educated would prefer to live under Nazism or Fascism than to fight for freedom and risk death. ~ Dennis Prager

I think it's wrong, ladies and gentlemen, for anybody to to be terrorized out of investigating anything. You have the right to read any book. You have the right to hear any speaker and that includes the vile communist that I'd just as soon gas - but you ought to hear him before we gas him. ~ George Lincoln Rockwell

Today, for example, one can imagine a good book being written by a Catholic, a Communist, a Fascist, a pacifist, an anarchist, perhaps by an old-style Liberal or an ordinary Conservative: one cannot imagine a good book being written by a spiritualist, a Buchmanite or a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The views that a writer holds must be compatible with sanity, in the medical sense, and with the power of continuous thought: beyond that what we ask of him is talent, which is probably another name for conviction. ~ George Orwell

No society has succeeded in abolishing the distinction between ruler and ruled ... to be a ruler gives one special status and, usually, special privileges. During the Communist era, important officials in the Soviet Union had access to special shops selling delicacies unavailable to ordinary citizens; before China allowed capitalist enterprises in its economy, travelling by car was a luxury limited to tourists and those high in the party hierarchy Throughout the 'communist' nations, the abolition of the old ruling class was followed by the rise of a new class of party bosses and well-placed bureaucrats, whose behaviour and life-style came more and more to resemble that of their much-denounced predecessors. In the end, nobody believed in the system any more. That, couple with its inability to match the productivity of the less bureaucratically controlled, more egoistically driven capitalist economies, led to its downfall. ~ Peter Singer