Socialism: Famous Quotes

Winston Churchill

• Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.
• Socialism is an attack on the right to breathe freely. No socialist system can be established without a political police.

Ronald Reagan

• Socialism only works in two places: Heaven where they don’t need it and hell where they already have it.
• Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

Ayn Rand

•  There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism – by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.
• The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual property rights.
• Socialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.

Margaret Thatcher

• Socialists cry “Power to the people”, and raise the clenched fist as they say it. We all know what they really mean – power over people, power to the State.
• The problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of everyone else’s money.
• No theory of government was ever given a fairer test or a more prolonged experiment in a democratic country than democratic socialism received in Britain. Yet it was a miserable failure in every respect… To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukemia with leeches.

Alexis de Tocqueville

• The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.
• As for me, I am deeply a democrat; this is why I am in no way a socialist. Democracy and socialism cannot go together. You can’t have it both ways. Socialism is a new form of slavery.
• Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.

Ludwig Von Mises

• Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.
• The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau.

Milton Friedman

• If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.