Top 180 Socialist Quotes

The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don’t invest, their holding too much money. We haven’t heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody’s afraid of the government and there’s no need soft peddling it, it’s the truth. It is the truth.

You cannot make a socialist revolution without really trying.

In the fall of 1963, in Leningrad, in what was then the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the young poet Dmitry Bobyshev stole the young poet Joseph Brodsky’s girlfriend.

Healthcare is the cornerstone of the socialist state. It is the crown jewel of the welfare state.

The right of such control is already admitted by the State Socialists, though they maintain that, as a matter of fact, the individual would be allowed a much larger liberty than he now enjoys.

This is a perilous time, and more than ever, the world needs a united and strong America. If, God forbid, we live to see Mr. Obama president, we will live through a socialist era that America has not seen before, and our country will be weakened in every way.

There is that much to be done that no select or small portion of people can do; only the greater mass of the Irish nation will ensure the achievement of a Socialist Republic, and this can only be done by hard work and sacrifice.

There’s something about Barack Obama that induces Americans to imagine what they cannot see. The Right envisions a vile socialist, while many on the Left picture an inspired liberal, politically restrained in his first term but now free to pursue his true beliefs.

Democracy in a socialist country is freedom in chains.

Factories are the workplaces of our National Socialist racial comrades.

The world view of the underdog socialist is encapsulated in the notion that the establishment has mastered the game of reason, judgment and statistics, leaving the left with emotion. Its heart is in the right place.

There is a disturbing reincarnation of socialist and nationalist dictatorships raising their heads around the world and even in our own back yard. You see it in places like Venezuela and Bolivia, stoked in no small part by Cuba, and also in Central Asia, and troubling trends in Russia and China.

There is always risk involved. You can’t be a capitalist only when there are investment profits but then a socialist when you experience losses.

I love the theatre and Miller is one of my all-time favourite playwrights. ‘All My Sons’ is a very socialist play, which exposes the lack of empathy that can accompany capitalism when it is left unchecked.

I was absolutely convinced that I wouldn’t win the Nobel Prize. My impression was that the Nobel Prize in Literature was given to people more or less affiliated with, let’s say, socialist ideas, and that was not my case.

My dad thinks Obama is a socialist and all these extreme views.

I’m a socialist, and I’m not going to be ashamed to say it!

Great Socialist statesmen aren’t made, they’re still-born.

I’ve been called communist, socialist, anti-American.

My presidential victory, if it had happened, would have been artificial in relation to the Socialist party. It may be that on my deathbed, I will come to regret my decision, but for the moment, I live at peace with it.

Socialists make the mistake of confusing individual worth with success. They believe you cannot allow people to succeed in case those who fail feel worthless.

Communism is a way of thinking. Socialism is wimpy communism. When you don’t have the courage to become a communist, you become a socialist.

‘Socialism’ became this weird household word partially because right-wingers call Obama a socialist, which he is the farthest from.

It is essential to link enterprises on the basis of objective laws of a socialist economy and legal system.

I am a ‘champagne socialist,’ and I’m proud of it.

My mother is a Chitrapur Saraswat from Mangalore and half-Telugu, and my father is a Bohri Muslim. My mother’s father, J Rameshwar Rao, was the Raja of Wanaparthy, a principality of Hyderabad. He was influenced by the socialist movement and became the first Raja to give up his title.

The claim of the State Socialists, however, that this right would not be exercised in matters pertaining to the individual in the more intimate and private relations of his life is not borne out by the history of governments.

If you read the history of the national Socialist party, they’re all people who felt like life should have been better to them. They’re disappointed, vengeful, angry.

This republic represents the greatest basis for that universal socialist order, the creation of which is at the present time the historic task of the International Proletariat.

Back in the early days of my political career, I was called Socialist Cindy. I just hate the nickname Cindy.

President Trump is performing a political exorcism on those who prefer to turn the U.S. into a socialist country – a country where the American Dream would become the American Nightmare.

When I talk about democratic socialist, I’m not looking at Venezuela. I’m not looking at Cuba. I’m looking at countries like Denmark and Sweden.

Among the most serious allegations a federal court can address are that an Executive agency has targeted citizens for mistreatment based on their political views. No citizen – Republican or Democrat, Socialist or libertarian – should be targeted or even have to fear being targeted on those grounds.

Let’s learn from history and take a look at other infamous socialist central-planning experiments like China’s Great Leap Forward or the Soviet Union’s Five-Year Plan. Like those two disasters, the Green New Deal would cripple our country and sacrifice Americans on the altar of environmental extremism.

To many Americans, saying the United States will never be socialist is rhetorical: Of course it won’t – we have a Constitution that forbids it.

Moammar Gaddafi, who has called himself the ‘Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya,’ should go down in history with the Emperor Bokassa and Idi Amin as a grotesque reminder of why people have the right to change their government.

Social Security, which transformed life for the elderly in this country, was ‘socialist.’ The concept of the ‘minimum wage’ was seen as a radical intrusion into the marketplace and was described as ‘socialist.’

Be these people either Conservatives or Socialists, Yellows or Reds, the most important thing is – and that is the point I want to stress – that all of them are right in the plain and moral sense of the word.

I’m a socialist. I’m amazed at how the spirit of socialism is alive and well in New York. I had always thought I wouldn’t want to be here without a lot of money, but I was wrong about that.

My husband is not American. He was born in Brazil, where he grew up under a filthy, corrupt dictatorship. In his twenties, he moved to Europe, where he lived for a while under various socialist democracies. He spent a few years on a kibbutz in Israel, living out a utopian experiment in communal existence.

You shouldn’t go around the world behaving ruthlessly when you don’t have to. Sometimes you do have to. There is only so much pie to go around. If you’re going to take more than your fair share of pie, as socialists would look at it, then someone else is not getting his. That means you’ve got to take it away from them.

My father was a socialist, so we had some of the most extraordinary people at home.

I barely need to reiterate what you already know: the close links that exist between our people and the people of Venezuela and Hugo Chavez, the promoter of the Bolivarian Revolution and the United Socialist Party he founded.

My view… would be that we are entering upon a new and interim society which is neither capitalist nor socialist, but in which we can achieve central planning without loss of individual initiative, by the mere process of absorbing initiative in the function of planning.

As I’ve had occasion to say before, I’m a pretty anti-sociable Socialist.

I imagine the Wall Street protesters would embrace Greece’s unusually generous benefits and massive welfare state, which were put in place by Socialist Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou in the 1980s.

In the minds of many Americans, if you are a radical Democrat or a Socialist, you are automatically a Communist. And if you are a Communist, then therefore you are an anti-American person and a person who is not a patriot. But nothing is further from the truth.

I am going to fight – I, a socialist and Syndicalist – so that we shall make an end to war, so that the little ones of France will sleep in peace, and the women go without fear.

I mean, how would you like to be fighting coronavirus in a socialist health care environment? A socialist system in which the manufacturers and creators of a vaccine would not be rewarded for their efforts? You think there’d be the same race to find a vaccine? No.

The Soviet Union, the socialist camp, the People’s Republic of China, and North Korea helped us resist, with essential supplies and weapons, the implacable blockade of the United States, the most powerful empire ever to exist.

By concentrating on what is good in people, by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice, and by asking them to put their faith in the future, socialists put themselves at a severe disadvantage.

Democratic socialists, why don’t you open your eyes, ‘Clockwork Orange’-style, and look at the truth.

We have to be honest and state that Nazis were involved in all Austrian parties after the Second World War: in the Freedom Party, in the Socialist Party, and also in my party.

In the little hall leading to it was a rack holding various Socialist or radical newspapers, tracts, and pamphlets in very small print and on very bad paper. The subjects treated were technical Marxist theories.

I don’t want to raise a family in a country run by left-wing socialists.

In general, if signs of sectarianism do appear in a Socialist Party, these are only the products of the absence of a broad Labour movement in the country.

You want a political culture that works to create conditions under which an economy can thrive? Since signing the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians, Israel has spent two decades working to unshackle its economy from its socialist roots, with remarkable results.

Early in 1888 one or two of us got together to establish our own Sheffield Socialist Society.

There’s a socialist bias to the consensus of the literary world: a ’30s mentality that says factory workers are more worthy of our attention.

We are all socialists now, it seems. John McCain, David Cameron and Gordon Brown attack bankers’ irresponsible behaviour and salaries, and call for state intervention in the financial markets. But these calls will not get them elected or re-elected if they are addressed only to the banking sector.

The historical experience of socialist countries has sadly demonstrated that collectivism does not do away with alienation but rather increases it, adding to it a lack of basic necessities and economic inefficiency.

The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument.

I was not raised a Zionist, but a socialist, as were most Jews before the Holocaust.

Bill Clinton is a moderate Democrat. I’m a democratic socialist.

I might not be a good socialist, any more than I’m a good Christian, but I am one.

Obamacare is a perfect tool to crush free enterprise and force all Americans into a socialist health care system.

I come from a very left wing Socialist family, anti-war and anti-empire.

Race pride, socialist ideals, and a sincerity as exalted as that of Carlyle’s visionaries coalesced in Asa Philip Randolph.

Above all, what socialist, without flushing with shame, maintains he is not a revolutionary? We say: none!.

All the collaborators of storytelling, in film and television, have to be partly self-centered because they need to do their work the best they can, and that’s what makes them really good at what they do, but then they also have to be a part of the socialist society, for the greater good.

The term ‘meritocracy’ was coined by socialist theoretician Michael Young, who crafted the party’s 1945 election manifesto.

Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

What about Jesus Christ? I say that he was a precursor of idealists; a precursor of socialists.

My feminist values are rooted in my socialist values. The number of women CEOs in Britain’s biggest companies is irrelevant if they pay their women workers poverty wages or discriminate against black employees.

Copyright is fundamentally socialist – it is radical and redistributive, subversive even. How else would you describe a form of property that anyone can create out of nothing?

In my book, ‘The Big Three in Economics,’ I found that the press has frequently and prematurely written the obituary of Adam Smith and his free-market philosophy, only to see a new and more vibrant global marketplace reemerge after being savagely attacked by Keynesians, Marxists, and assorted socialists.

Too many younger Americans have been misled by the Green New Deal, which is a socialist manifesto more than a climate proposal. The GND’s reckless energy policies would punish American workers while allowing China to pollute at will.

I am a socialist; of course I am a socialist. To hold a vision that society can be fundamentally different, to believe that all people can be equal – that is not a new idea.

There is a buffet of ideologies for me to choose from. I’ve been a fan of certain communist and socialist ideals. Some have failed, some have succeeded. I’ve lived long enough to understand where all they failed.

Yes, Socialists should defend their country in great historical crises.

Dubois was the first black American to graduate from Harvard. He was accepted within the northern white intellectual circles as one of the ‘best of his race.’ As an avowed socialist, he was the only black member of the original 19 wealthy socialist founders of the NAACP.

I honestly don’t know what criteria makes someone right-wing or left-wing anymore. The boundaries of those definitions seem to be in a state of flux. I’m not socialist, I know that.

All across the country, the DSA socialists are mobilizing to stop Eric Adams. They realize if I’m successful, we’re going to start the process of regaining control of our cities.

The idea of the Songun revolution is an idea of giving importance and precedence to military affairs in implementing the masses’ cause of independence, the socialist cause, and pushing ahead with the overall revolution and construction with the revolutionary army as the core force.

Let me tell you, very frankly, when I went to the Harvard Business School I was more or less a committed socialist.

France has had socialist presidents on and off since the 1920s, and it remains a free country. Socialists have ruled in many South American countries without ushering in disaster.

We’re at the crossroads. Down one road is a European centralized bureaucratic socialist welfare system in which politicians and bureaucrats define the future. Down the other road is a proud, solid, reaffirmation of American exceptionalism.

I saw the Blair-Mandelson regime as a coup, and I think it was a well-funded coup as well – resources obviously came from big private-sector backers. But all through that period the bulk of the rank and file party were what the party has always been, a socialist party.

The Revolution did not assume a socialist nature because of support from the U.S.S.R.; it was the other way around: support from the U.S.S.R. was produced by the socialist nature of the Cuban Revolution. To such a degree, that when the U.S.S.R. disappears, Cuba keeps on being socialist.

What the underdog socialist has forgotten is that the story of the left ought to be a narrative of hope and progress.

And I’m asking for your support because I want to defend America, as I’ve said before, from becoming a socialist nation.

I think there are a lot of people who, when they hear the word ‘socialist,’ get very, very nervous.

Capitalism is using its money; we socialists throw it away.

And I don’t want my assets to be stuck inside a banana republic in the midst of a huge socialist experiment.

You go to your public library, or you call your fire department or police department, what do you think you are calling? These are socialist institutions.

I am still a socialist. I am a left-of-center politician. I believe that in Africa, if you see the poverty around us, you can’t afford to be anything else.

Everyone’s goals are the same with very small differences. I mean, the goal of a socialist and the goal of a libertarian are exactly the same. The goals are happiness and security and freedom, and you balance those.

I was working for the Socialist International, after I left university in 1959, as a researcher.

I think the Right did us a service calling Obama a socialist for eight years. It inoculated us.

All artists are socialists until they see another artist with a bigger house than theirs.

Nothing could be more contrary to American values than the mob-like mentality and socialist precepts pushed by the far left. They seek nothing less than the complete destruction of the basis on which America was founded.

I am not saying that during the Second World War Germany did not, under the leadership of the National Socialist government, commit crimes.

I was brought up a working-class Tory. I believe, to be a true socialist, you have to be a capitalist first. In my heart, I’m a socialist; in my mind, I’m a capitalist.

This most dangerous enemy is the American counterpart of the British Fabian Socialist, who denies that he is a Socialist and operates behind a mask which he calls National Planning.

From the coffee bars of Camden to the gin joints of Norfolk – across Britain, a revolution is brewing. And no, it’s not John McDonnell’s bitter socialist hooch. It’s a generation growing up with an entirely different view of the world – free thinking, optimistic and hungry for success.

While no famine has ever taken place in a democracy, they’re the rule rather than the exception in socialist countries.

At the time I belonged to the socialist party, and Hitler came to power.

I am not a man of my party. I do not talk only to socialists and union leaders.

Agricultural workers, together with the working class, constitute the main force in building a powerful socialist country, and the agricultural front is now a major thrust area in building the country into a socialist economic giant.

Many countries, even socialist Sweden and former communist Russia, have done away with their death taxes. They found the confiscation of wealth at death to be counterproductive.

We must be open to creating alliances of progressive and socialist organisations on a local level, particularly given the undemocratic electoral system face.

I would remind you the lesser of two socialists is still a socialist.

Obama doesn’t run around wearing a Carrie Bradshaw-esque nameplate necklace that says ‘Socialist.’ But his policies, actions, words, background and associations speak louder than any ID necklace ever could.

The extreme socialists desire to run every nation as a single business concern.

The dream of socialists, the Maximum Programme, has always been to eliminate the private property, the family and the nation state. With the private property they have not succeeded, but they continue on the path of destruction of the family and the nation.

As the old joke goes, I have all the sins together. I am a woman, a Socialist, separated and agnostic.

In the time of the robber barons, my great grandfather insisted on reinvesting and sharing profits with workers… He was told he was a socialist, that he was not welcome on Wall Street.

Ralph Miliband was a socialist intellectual of great integrity. He belonged to a generation of socialists formed by the Russian revolution and the Second World War, a generation that dominated left-wing politics for almost a century.

I’m a pro forma Bernie Sanders donor. In years past, when Michael Harrington was still alive, I was a very active member of Democratic Socialists of America.

President Trump can only do so much while pro-China socialists like AOC are in charge.

I’m a very friendly socialist.

Our way is straight and clear – the building up of a socialist democracy at home, with freedom and prosperity for all, and the maintenance of world peace and friendship with all nations abroad.

And you cannot have a socialist revolution commandeered from the top, ordered around by some omniscient leader or group of leaders.

Nothing in socialist doctrine argues for the abuse of power, from Thomas More, to Karl Marx, to Chavez, to Ocasio-Cortez. Historically, however, it has been the case that socialist countries often end up violently suppressing their citizens.

I think one of the very frightening things about the regime of the National Socialists is that it made people happy.

Universities are basically socialist institutions.

Most actors are socialists, aren’t they?

If the Labour party goes back to reasserting its socialist and democratic beliefs, that’s where I belong.

When I ran for the Senate the first time, I ran against the wealthiest guy in the state of Vermont. He spent a lot on advertising – very ugly stuff. He kept attacking me as a liberal. He didn’t use the word ‘socialist’ at all because everybody in the state knows that I am that.

It’s not difficult in South Africa for the ordinary person to see the link between capitalism and racist exploitation, and when one sees the link one immediately thinks in terms of a socialist alternative.

To the socialist no nation is free whose national existence is based upon the enslavement of another people, for to him colonial peoples, too, are peoples, and, as such, parts of the national state.

I grew up in a strongly socialist family. While I was at school, I worked in party politics and with organizations like the Anti-Nazi League. Everywhere I saw it, I fought prejudice.

Students at Kim Il Sung University are reserve hardcore talents who will become leading officials of the revolution responsible for the important sectors and posts in the building of a powerful socialist country, the backbone in the struggle for the victory of the Juche revolution.

The pro-independence movement has all different social sensibilities – from left to right, including pro-liberal, socialist and communist.

Everyone who knows me, they know that I am not a socialist.

Socialist ideology is making France go to pot, and the French language with it.

The failure of the Russian Socialist Republic will be the defeat of the proletariat of the whole world.

I have the greatest sympathy with the growth of the socialist party. I think they understand the evils that surround us and hammer them into people’s minds better than we Liberals.

I was unlucky enough to grow up under a military dictatorship which had very Left-wing, socialist policies. It’s not something I would wish on anyone.

I’m a very bad Christian, but I am a Christian. I think that all women, unless they are absolutely asleep, must be feminists up to a point. And socialist, well yes, of course, it’s not a fashionable word, but I am very much of the Left.

Why do I hate Obamacare? Because it is a blast against freedom. It is a socialist program which will not work. It hasn’t worked anywhere in the world. It will be repealed.

So far I go with the Socialists as to think it a pretty general rule that, where monopoly is necessary, it is better in public hands.

‘Bernie versus Bernie,’ for me, is these two extremes of capitalism. It’s Bernie Sanders, the ultimate socialist, and Bernie Madoff, the ultimate capitalist.

The north of Sweden is very socialist and poor. They feel left out and despise Stockholm in many ways because Stockholm has become new liberals and much more Americanized.

The difference between a contemporary liberal and a socialist is that to a liberal the most beautiful word in the English language is ‘forbidden’, whereas to a socialist the most beautiful word is ‘compulsory’.

For me, politics is about passion. It doesn’t matter what you know; it’s your actions that count. I meet people who say they’re socialists, and that’s not what they carry out in their everyday life.

People like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been very busy educating America about just how much socialism we have, from Social Security to Medicare to public schools to public universities, and how much we love that. The truth is that there is no pure socialist or capitalist economy on earth.

Socialist democracy is not, a luxury and its need is not limited to the most advanced industrial countries.

When a battle for suffrage is conducted, it should only be conducted according to socialist principles, and therefore with the demand of universal suffrage for women and men.

I don’t see Republicans flipping their lids trying to burn down buildings in Ninja outfits when a Democrat, progressive, or socialist tries to speak.

Bill O’Reilly is a socialist. He is in favor of Medicare, he is in favor of Social Security. Those are socialist programs.

Representative Spencer Bachus is one of the only people I know from Alabama. I bet I’m the only socialist he knows.

I don’t see how a socialist government can tolerate hunting on horseback. The people who do this are snobs; they’re very well-to-do.

By the time of my ninth birthday, I had become a bit of a socialist, as I am said by conservative colleagues to be to this day. I went on within the next few years to volunteer as an envelope stuffer for the American Labor Party, and my political thinking has not shifted measurably since that time.

Immigrants and refugees who have escaped the corrupt, dysfunctional, crime-ridden, socialist and communist regimes of Latin America are precisely the kind of hard-working and grateful people we should be welcoming to the U.S.

A country like Belgium, or socialist countries in central Europe spend more money on art education than the United States, which is a really puzzling thought.

I’m a socialist.

I have been a lot of ‘firsts’ on the national political stage, including the first African American congressman from the Bay Area and one of the first Democratic Socialists in Congress.

Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life.

My mother – she’s a good old classic Northern European socialist – she’s totally wonderful, but she raised me up believing that rich people have stolen their money from poor people.

Bernie Sanders is a socialist. I think Bernie Sanders is good candidate for president of Sweden. We don’t want to be Sweden. We want to be the United States of America.

But the underdog socialists’ biggest problem isn’t that they are wrong. They are not. Their biggest problem is that they’re dull. Dull as a doorknob. They’ve got no story to tell; nor even the language to convey it in.

Class struggle: external peace, international solidarity, peace among peoples. This is the sacred slogan of international socialist democracy that liberates nations.

The post-totalitarian malady has taken its most acute form in Romania. And it has taken place for very specific reasons. The repression here has been more cruel, more brutal, than in other states caught in the inferno of a ‘socialist paradise.’

When I was in college, I was always saying I was a socialist.

I think most people would love for us to be a socialist society.

Leaders cling to power in a socialist state like Venezuela by buying votes and manipulating elections.

In these momentous hours of our history we call on every Hungarian worker who is led by devotion to the people and the country to join our Party, the name of which is the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party.

Environmentalists are a socialist group of individuals that are the tool of the Democrat Party. I’m proud to say that they are my enemy. They are not Americans, never have been Americans, never will be Americans.

But we don’t have an example of a democratic society existing in a socialist economy – which is the only real alternative to capitalism in the modern world.

You wonder, how could socialists, true socialists work with Islamists? Because if those Islamists take over, the first thing they’re going to do is kill the socialists.

The argument of socialists, that people really want to share, beyond a reasonable level of charity, is rubbish, though it is espoused by a lot of rich, pious hypocrites who want to share only enough to avoid widespread starvation, mob violence, and government seizure of more of their incomes.

The year 2015 was a year of gigantic struggle, which is adorned with meaningful events and eye-opening successes, a year of victory and glory, in which socialist Korea fully demonstrated its prestige and might.

I do not want to be associated with those that are willing to support undermining the basic human rights that socialists have fought and sacrificed themselves to secure and protect over generations.

Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind.

I’m a socialist. I know Marx and communism did not work before, but I think in the future you have the possibility of having total communism and equal access to everything for everybody.

I guess I’m a socialist at heart.

I am convinced that there are few, if any, American people that could even start believing or understanding what living in a socialist country does to a person.

I’m somewhat of a socialist in the sense that I believe in housing for the homeless and medical care for all. So, for me, the American dream has been having a TV show, and being successful and having a nice house and having everything.

In the matter of the maintenance and rearing of children the Anarchists would neither institute the communistic nursery which the State Socialists favor nor keep the communistic school system which now prevails.