Socialist Love Quotes

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The Marxians love of democratic institutions was a stratagem only, a pious fraud for the deception of the masses. Within a socialist community there is no room left for freedom.
Ludwig von Mises
I used to think that the world was doing something to me, that the world owed me something. And that either the conservatives or the socialists or the fascists or the communists or the Christians or the Jews or the fascists were doing something to me. And when you're a teeny-booper, that's what you think. I'm 40 now, I don't think that anymore—because I found out it doesn't fucking work. I am part of them. There's no separation. Were all one. "Give peace a chance," not "Shoot people for peace." "All you need is love." I believe it. It's damn hard, but I absolutely believe it.
John Lennon
Oh that. Men do fall in love with me. They seem to think me a creature with volcanic passions; I'm sure I don't know why. All the volcanic women I know are plain little creatures with sandy hair. I don't consider human volcanoes respectable. And I'm so tired of the subject. Our house is always full of women in love with my husband and men in love with me. We encourage it because it's pleasant to have company.
George Bernard Shaw (Works of George Bernard Shaw (30+ Works) Pygmalion, Major Barbara, Candida, The Irrational Knot, An Unsocial Socialist & more (mobi))
The commandment, 'Love thy neighbour as thyself', is the strongest defence against human aggressiveness and an excellent example of the unpsychological [expectations] of the cultural super-ego. The commandment is impossible to fulfil; such an enormous inflation of love can only lower its value, not get rid of the difficulty. Civilization pays no attention to all this; it merely admonishes us that the harder it is to obey the precept the more meritorious it is to do so. But anyone who follows such a precept in present-day civilization only puts himself at a disadvantage vis-a-vis the person who disregards it. What a potent obstacle to civilization aggressiveness must be, if the defence against it can cause as much unhappiness as aggressiveness itself! 'Natural' ethics, as it is called, has nothing to offer here except the narcissistic satisfaction of being able to think oneself better than others. At this point the ethics based on religion introduces its promises of a better after-life. But so long as virtue is not rewarded here on earth, ethics will, I fancy, preach in vain. I too think it quite certain that a real change in the relations of human beings to possessions would be of more help in this direction than any ethical commands; but the recognition of this fact among socialists has been obscured and made useless for practical purposes by a fresh idealistic misconception of human nature.
Sigmund Freud (Civilization and Its Discontents)
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist.
Zack Love (The Syrian Virgin (The Syrian Virgin, #1))
I am no worshiper of cloth of any color, but I love the red flag and what it symbolizes to me and other Socialists. I have a red flag hanging in my study, and if I could I should gladly march with it past the office of the Times and let all the reporters and photographers make the most of the spectacle.
Helen Keller (How I became a Socialist?: Helen Keller's Articles)
To say that we want wages for housework is to expose the fact that housework is already money for capital, that capital has made and makes money out of our cooking, smiling, fucking. At the same time, it shows that we have cooked, smiled, fucked throughout the years not because it was easier for us than for anybody else, but because we did not have any other choice. Our faces have become distorted from so much smiling, our feelings have got lost from so much loving, our oversexualization has left us completely desexualized.
Silvia Federici (Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Common Notions))
Most of Colombo's socialists don't love the poor. They just hate the rich.
Shehan Karunatilaka (The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida)
I am a Soviet born American Jew. I was born in and left Soviet Union, while it was and in some cases still is, oppressive and socialist nation. I love America and being an American. I could never understand, why would people willingly give up their freedom!!
Jake Danishevsky
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.
Zack Love (The Syrian Virgin (The Syrian Virgin, #1))
And how she regretted, watching his face locked in grief even as he slept, his lip trembling, that she’d frittered hours away reading about socialists and unions and progressives and politics and corporations, fighting about a meaningless flag that said “I’m proud to be an American,” when it should have said “I’m happy to be alive,” and what the difference was, and how one’s tribe cannot be better than another tribe because they were all one tribe. An extraordinary wisdom came upon her, one she had not imagined possible, and she wanted to share it with him in those first—or perhaps last—moments of her consciousness. But after seeing his lovely face, she felt yet again an enormous
James McBride (The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store)
If you love our country you are national, and if you love our people you are a socialist.
Oswald Mosley
America really is two countries today.  One half still loves freedom, and the other half’s already socialist, even if they don’t call it that—yet.  The free half is keeping them from going all the way to having the kind of socialist government they want, but they can’t quite shove us out of the way while we’ve got so many guns.  I think that’s really what all this is about: once they’ve got our guns, they’ll just pass all their damn socialist laws.  They’ll just increase our taxes until we’re like Sweden, and if we don’t like it, tough shit.  Anybody that fights back will get a free ride to a special camp for problem children.
Matthew Bracken (Enemies Foreign And Domestic (The Enemies Trilogy, #1))
This fact has contributed greatly both to humankind’s extraordinary social abilities and to its unique social problems. Lone mothers could hardly forage enough food for their offspring and themselves with needy children in tow. Raising children required constant help from other family members and neighbours. It takes a tribe to raise a human. Evolution thus favoured those capable of forming strong social ties. In addition, since humans are born underdeveloped, they can be educated and socialised to a far greater extent than any other animal. Most mammals emerge from the womb like glazed earthenware emerging from a kiln – any attempt at remoulding will only scratch or break them. Humans emerge from the womb like molten glass from a furnace. They can be spun, stretched and shaped with a surprising degree of freedom. This is why today we can educate our children to become Christian or Buddhist, capitalist or socialist, warlike or peace-loving. We assume that a large brain, the use of
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
I resist racists, not intergrationists. I resist seditionists, not abolitionists. I resist propagandists, not journalists. I resist extortionists, not opportunists. I resist chauvinists, not feminists. I embrace activists, not extremists. I embrace nationalists, not terrorists. I embrace intergrationists, not racists. I embrace lobbyists, not imperialists. I embrace conservationists, not depletionists. I believe in liberty, not censorship. I believe in justice, not oppression. I believe in equality, not discrimination. I believe in unity, not conformity. I believe in freedom, not tyranny. I believe in democracy, not despotism. I believe in desegregation, not racism. I believe in fairness, not tribalism. I believe in impartiality, not classism. I believe in emancipation, not sexism. I believe in truth, not lies. I believe in charity, not greed. I believe in peace, not strife. I believe in harmony, not conflict. I believe in love, not hatred. I am a conformist and a futurist. I am a traditionalist and a modernist. I am a fundamentalist and a liberalist. I am an optimist and a pessimist. I am an idealist and a realist. I am a theorist and a pragmatist. I am an industrialist and a philanthropist. I am an anarchist and a pacifist. I am a collectivist and an individualist. I am a capitalist and a socialist.
Matshona Dhliwayo
God, am I like the rest after all?” — So he used to think starting awake at night — “Am I like the rest?” This was poor material for a socialist but good material for those who do much of the world’s rarest work. The truth was that for some months he had been going through that partitioning of the things of youth wherein it is decided whether or not to die for what one no longer believes. In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger's pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)
Facts about Jesus that I told Kimberly to annoy her 1. Jesus was Jewish 2. Jesus was a socialist 3. Jesus was a refugee 4. Jesus was anti-death penalty 5. Jesus was anti-school prayer (Matthew 6:5) 6. Jesus was opposed to the accumulation of wealth 7. Jesus was silent on the issues of homosexuality and gay marriage 8. Jesus was a brown-skinned Middle Easterner who wore sandals to the dinner table 9. Jesus was a friend to prostitutes
Matthew Dicks (Twenty-one Truths About Love)
When power, conceived in honor, by noble men, and nurtured by freedom, ceases to be shackled by (well meaning?) socialist ideologues, naïve pacifists, and fatuous political correctness, the power conceived by evil men, who love power for its own sake, will cease to find unfettered influence.
Anthony Davis
party….” In New York, several thousand gathered at Tompkins Square. The tone of the meeting was moderate, speaking of “a political revolution through the ballot box.” And: “If you will unite, we may have here within five years a socialistic republic…. Then will a lovely morning break over this darkened land.” It was a peaceful meeting. It adjourned. The last words heard from the platform were: “Whatever we poor men may not have, we have free speech, and no one can take it from us.” Then the police charged, using their clubs.
Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States)
It is no idle boast of the vermin Socialists that their system is Christianity, and no other is genuine. And look at them! To a man […] they are atheists and in favor of Free Love—whatever that may mean. I have talked with many Socialists, but never with one who understood his subject. Empty babblers they are, muddle-headed philanthropists. They read a shilling abridgement of John Stuart Mill, and settle all economic problems over a --sirloin of turnips-- in some filthy crank food dive. Ask them any question about detail, and the bubble is pricked.
Aleister Crowley (The World's Tragedy)
Exhibit A: I’m guessing you’re no fan of socialism, which was a founding principle of the Nazi movement. The name “Nazi” is an acronym for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, which most of today’s Democrat socialists conveniently forget. Actually, that’s an understatement. These people don’t just overlook this truth, they’ve totally rewritten history on the matter. These days, Nazism gets associated with conservatism at the drop of a hat, but historically it stems from the left. Adolf Hitler? An art-loving vegetarian who seized power by wooing voters away from Germany’s Social Democrat and communist parties. Italy’s Benito Mussolini? Raised on Karl Marx’s Das Kapital before starting his career as a left-wing journalist and, later, implementing a deadly fascist regime.
Dave Rubin (Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason)
To a friend, in an unguarded moment, he [Maxim Gorky, 1932] declared his ambition: simply to portray the world and man as they were, without the myth of love, ‘repudiating noting, praising nothing’; repudiation was unjust, while praise was premature—‘for we live in chaos and ourselves are fragments of chaos.’ He compared his desire with Einstein, ‘trying to alter radically our representation of the universe.
Dan Levin (Stormy Petrel: The Life and Work of Maxim Gorky)
John Dewey, a socialist pioneer of modern schooling, said in 1928 that he loved that schools had a rule “in building up forces… whose natural effect is to undermine the importance and uniqueness of family life.”86
Connor Boyack (Children of the Collective)
I don’t necessarily admire whom and what you choose to read and the gullibility with which you take at face value rationalist blasphemies spouted by an immoralist of the ilk of Bertrand Russell, four times married, a blatant adulterer, an advocate of free love, a self-confessed socialist dismissed from his university position for his antiwar campaigning during the First War and imprisoned for that by the British authorities.
Philip Roth (Indignation)
Humans emerge from the womb like molten glass from a furnace. They can be spun, stretched and shaped with a surprising degree of freedom. This is why today we can educate our children to become Christian or Buddhist, capitalist or socialist, warlike or peace-loving. We
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
We are at our best when we love the Lord and his church more than our style of life. We do not believe in our country, right or wrong. If evil has such a grip upon the institutions of government, we know that evil must be overthrown by one means or another. We are not monarchists, republicans or socialists, although our membership includes them all and more. We are pilgrims, who want to pass through a land that will support our journey to the Kingdom; and, if need be, the noblest of us will choose to occupy that land for a bit shorter time than usual rather than deny the Lord of the Kingdom.
Urban T. Holmes III (What Is Anglicanism? (The Anglican Studies Series))
Keller, who devoted much of her later life to raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind, never wavered in her belief that our society needed radical change. Having herself fought so hard to speak, she helped found the American Civil Liberties Union to fight for the free speech of others. She sent $100 to the NAACP with a letter of support that appeared in its magazine The Crisis—a radical act for a white person from Alabama in the 1920s. She supported Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate, in each of his campaigns for the presidency. She composed essays on the women’s movement, on politics, on economics. Near the end of her life, she wrote to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, leader of the American Communist Party, who was then languishing in jail, a victim of the McCarthy era: “Loving birthday greetings, dear Elizabeth Flynn! May the sense of serving mankind bring strength and peace into your brave heart!
James W. Loewen (Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong)
No one wanted the job. What had seemed one of the least challenging tasks facing Franklin D. Roosevelt as newly elected president had, by June 1933, become one of the most intransigent. As ambas-sadorial posts went, Berlin should have been a plum—not London or Paris, surely, but still one of the great capitals of Europe, and at the center of a country going through revolutionary change under the leadership of its newly appointed chancellor, Adolf Hitler. Depending on one’s point of view, Germany was experiencing a great revival or a savage darkening. Upon Hitler’s ascent, the country had undergone a brutal spasm of state- condoned violence. Hitler’s brown- shirted paramilitary army, the Sturmabteilung, or SA—the Storm Troopers—had gone wild, arresting, beating, and in some cases murdering communists, socialists, and Jews. Storm Troopers established impromptu prisons and torture stations in basements, sheds, and other structures. Berlin alone had fi fty of these so- called bunkers. Tens of thousands of people were arrested and placed in “protective custody”— Schutzhaft—a risible euphemism. An esti-mated fi ve hundred to seven hundred prisoners died in custody; others endured “mock drownings and hangings,” according to a police affi davit. One prison near Tempelhof Airport became especially no-torious: Columbia House, not to be confused with a sleekly modern new building at the heart of Berlin called Columbus House. The up-heaval prompted one Jewish leader, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of New York, to tell a friend, “the frontiers of civilization have been crossed.
Erik Larson (In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin)
Just as this free-lance socialist was gathering up their day’s receipts, Joe lets him have it, with a cleaver. Curtain. The only notable thing about it was that Joe acted so quickly and correctly in the crunch, for I feel sure that the only fighting that he had ever tried was that which I forced on him in the ‘Libby.
Robert A. Heinlein (Time Enough for Love)
When the first news of the Nazi camps was published in 1945, there were those who thought the facts might be exaggerated either by Allied war propaganda or by the human tendency to relish 'atrocity stories.' In his column in the London magazine Tribune, George Orwell wrote that, though this might be so, the speculation was not exactly occurring in a vacuum. If you remember what the Nazis did to the Jews before the war, he said, it isn't that difficult to imagine what they might do to them during one. In one sense, the argument over 'Holocaust denial' ends right there. The National Socialist Party seized power in 1933, proclaiming as its theoretical and organising principle the proposition that the Jews were responsible for all the world's ills, from capitalist profiteering to subversive Bolshevism. By means of oppressive legislation, they began to make all of Germany Judenrein, or 'Jew-free.' Jewish businesses were first boycotted and then confiscated. Jewish places of worship were first vandalised and then closed. Wherever Nazi power could be extended—to the Rhineland, to Austria and to Sudeten Czechoslovakia—this pattern of cruelty and bigotry was repeated. (And, noticed by few, the state killing of the mentally and physically 'unfit,' whether Jewish or 'Aryan,' was tentatively inaugurated.) After the war broke out, Hitler was able to install puppet governments or occupation regimes in numerous countries, each of which was compelled to pass its own version of the anti-Semitic 'Nuremberg Laws.' Most ominous of all—and this in plain sight and on camera, and in full view of the neighbours—Jewish populations as distant as Salonika were rounded up and put on trains, to be deported to the eastern provinces of conquered Poland. None of this is, even in the remotest sense of the word, 'deniable.
Christopher Hitchens (Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays)
Beneath the surface, however, Germany had undergone a rapid and sweeping revolution that reached deep into the fabric of daily life. It had occurred quietly and largely out of easy view. At its core was a government campaign called Gleichschaltung—meaning “Coordination”—to bring citizens, government ministries, universities, and cultural and social institutions in line with National Socialist beliefs and attitudes.
Erik Larson (In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin)
To many an upright poor person, it seems needless to invent a god who will wash the feet of beggars and exalt those who do not care to labor. What is this but a denial of thrift and a sickly obsession with the victim? The so-called common people are quite able to penetrate this ruse (“The good lord must indeed love the poor, since he made so many of them”). Many decent people are made uneasy by the constant injunction to give alms and to dwell among those who have lost their self-respect. They can also see the hook sticking out of the bait: abandon this useless life, leave your family, and follow the prophet who says that the world is soon to pass away. Such an injunction coupled with an implicit or explicit “or else” is repulsive to many conservatives who believe in self-reliance and personal integrity, and who distrust “charity,” just as it was repulsive to the early socialists who did not think that poverty was an ideal or romantic or ennobled state.
Christopher Hitchens (The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever)
Through us infinite wrong was brought over many peoples and countries. That which we often testified to in our communities, we express now in the name of the whole Church: we did fight for long years in the name of Jesus Christ against the mentality that found its awful expression in the National Socialist regime of violence; but we accuse ourselves for not standing by our beliefs more courageously, for not praying more faithfully, for not believing more joyously, and for not loving more ardently.
Nicholas Stargardt (The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945)
since humans are born underdeveloped, they can be educated and socialised to a far greater extent than any other animal. Most mammals emerge from the womb like glazed earthenware emerging from a kiln – any attempt at remoulding will only scratch or break them. Humans emerge from the womb like molten glass from a furnace. They can be spun, stretched and shaped with a surprising degree of freedom. This is why today we can educate our children to become Christian or Buddhist, capitalist or socialist, warlike or peace-loving.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Delight in smooth-sounding platitudes, refusal to face unpleasant facts, desire for popularity and electoral success irrespective of the vital interests of the State, genuine love of peace and pathetic belief that love can be its sole foundation, obvious lack of intellectual vigour in both leaders of the British Coalition Government, marked ignorance of Europe and aversion from its problems in Mr. Baldwin, the strong and violent pacifism which at this time dominated the Labour-Socialist Party, the utter devotion of the Liberals to sentiment apart from reality, the failure and worse than failure of Mr. Lloyd George, the erstwhile great war-time leader, to address himself to the continuity of his work, the whole supported by overwhelming majorities in both Houses of Parliament: all these constituted a picture of British fatuity and fecklessness which, though devoid of guile, was not devoid of guilt, and, though free from wickedness or evil design, played a definite part in the unleashing upon the world of horrors and miseries which, even so far as they have unfolded, are already beyond comparison in human experience.
Winston S. Churchill (The Gathering Storm: The Second World War, Volume 1 (Winston Churchill World War II Collection))
Restrict nothing--keep everything open: to Italy, to China, to anybody. I love America, I believe in America, because her belly can hold and digest all--anarchist, socialist, peacemakers, fighters, disturbers or degenerates of whatever sort--hold and digest all. If I felt that America could not do this I would be indifferent as between our institutions and any others. America is not all in all--the sum total: she is only to contribute her contribution to the big scheme. What shall that contribution be? I say, let it be something worth while--something exceptional, ennobling.
Walt Whitman (Walt Whitman Speaks: His Final Thoughts on Life, Writing, Spirituality, and the Promise of America: A Library of America Special Publication)
You know...give peace a chance, not shoot people for peace. All we need is love. I believe it. it's damned hard but I absolutely believe it. We're not the first to say 'Imagine no countries' or 'Give peace a chance' but we're carrying that torch, like the Olympic torch, passing it from hand to hand, to each other, to each country, to each generation. That's our job...I've never claimed divinity. I've never claimed purity of soul. I've never claimed to have the answer to life. I can only put out songs and answer questions as honestly as I can, but only as honestly as I can, no more, no less. "I used to think that the world was doing it to me and that the world owed me something, and that either the conservatives or the socialists or the fascists or the communists or the Christians or the Jews were doing something to me, and when you're a teenybopper that's what you think. I'm 40 now. I don't think that anymore, 'cause I found out it doesn't fucking work. The thing goes on anyway and all you're doing is jacking off and screaming about what your mommy or daddy or society did...I have found out personally...that I am responsible for it as well as them. I am part of them.
Philip Norman (John Lennon: The Life)
The military authorities were concerned that soldiers going home on leave would demoralize the home population with horror stories of the Ostfront. ‘You are under military law,’ ran the forceful reminder, ‘and you are still subject to punishment. Don’t speak about weapons, tactics or losses. Don’t speak about bad rations or injustice. The intelligence service of the enemy is ready to exploit it.’ One soldier, or more likely a group, produced their own version of instructions, entitled ‘Notes for Those Going on Leave.’ Their attempt to be funny reveals a great deal about the brutalizing affects of the Ostfront. ‘You must remember that you are entering a National Socialist country whose living conditions are very different to those to which you have been accustomed. You must be tactful with the inhabitants, adapting to their customs and refrain from the habits which you have come to love so much. Food: Do not rip up the parquet or other kinds of floor, because potatoes are kept in a different place. Curfew: If you forget your key, try to open the door with the round-shaped object. Only in cases of extreme urgency use a grenade. Defense Against Partisans: It is not necessary to ask civilians the password and open fire upon receiving an unsatisfactory answer. Defense Against Animals: Dogs with mines attached to them are a special feature of the Soviet Union. German dogs in the worst cases bite, but they do not explode. Shooting every dog you see, although recommended in the Soviet Union, might create a bad impression. Relations with the Civil Population: In Germany just because someone is wearing women’s clothes does not necessarily mean that she is a partisan. But in spite of this, they are dangerous for anyone on leave from the front. General: When on leave back to the Fatherland take care not to talk about the paradise existence in the Soviet Union in case everybody wants to come here and spoil our idyllic comfort.
Antony Beevor (Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943)
New Rule: If you're going to have a rally where hundreds of thousands of people show up, you may as well go ahead and make it about something. With all due respect to my friends Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, it seems that if you truly wanted to come down on the side of restoring sanity and reason, you'd side with the sane and the reasonable--and not try to pretend the insanity is equally distributed in both parties. Keith Olbermann is right when he says he's not the equivalent of Glenn Beck. One reports facts; the other one is very close to playing with his poop. And the big mistake of modern media has been this notion of balance for balance's sake, that the left is just as violent and cruel as the right, that unions are just as powerful as corporations, that reverse racism is just as damaging as racism. There's a difference between a mad man and a madman. Now, getting more than two hundred thousand people to come to a liberal rally is a great achievement that gave me hope, and what I really loved about it was that it was twice the size of the Glenn Beck crowd on the Mall in August--although it weight the same. But the message of the rally as I heard it was that if the media would just top giving voice to the crazies on both sides, then maybe we could restore sanity. It was all nonpartisan, and urged cooperation with the moderates on the other side. Forgetting that Obama tried that, and found our there are no moderates on the other side. When Jon announced his rally, he said that the national conversation is "dominated" by people on the right who believe Obama's a socialist, and by people on the left who believe 9/11 was an inside job. But I can't name any Democratic leaders who think 9/11 was an inside job. But Republican leaders who think Obama's socialist? All of them. McCain, Boehner, Cantor, Palin...all of them. It's now official Republican dogma, like "Tax cuts pay for themselves" and "Gay men just haven't met the right woman." As another example of both sides using overheated rhetoric, Jon cited the right equating Obama with Hitler, and the left calling Bush a war criminal. Except thinking Obama is like Hitler is utterly unfounded--but thinking Bush is a war criminal? That's the opinion of Major General Anthony Taguba, who headed the Army's investigation into Abu Ghraib. Republicans keep staking out a position that is farther and farther right, and then demand Democrats meet them in the middle. Which now is not the middle anymore. That's the reason health-care reform is so watered down--it's Bob Dole's old plan from 1994. Same thing with cap and trade--it was the first President Bush's plan to deal with carbon emissions. Now the Republican plan for climate change is to claim it's a hoax. But it's not--I know because I've lived in L.A. since '83, and there's been a change in the city: I can see it now. All of us who live out here have had that experience: "Oh, look, there's a mountain there." Governments, led my liberal Democrats, passed laws that changed the air I breathe. For the better. I'm for them, and not the party that is plotting to abolish the EPA. I don't need to pretend both sides have a point here, and I don't care what left or right commentators say about it, I can only what climate scientists say about it. Two opposing sides don't necessarily have two compelling arguments. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on that mall in the capital, and he didn't say, "Remember, folks, those southern sheriffs with the fire hoses and the German shepherds, they have a point, too." No, he said, "I have a dream. They have a nightmare. This isn't Team Edward and Team Jacob." Liberals, like the ones on that field, must stand up and be counted, and not pretend we're as mean or greedy or shortsighted or just plain batshit at them. And if that's too polarizing for you, and you still want to reach across the aisle and hold hands and sing with someone on the right, try church.
Bill Maher (The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass)
I hope you have all mastered the official Socialist jargon which our masters, as they call themselves, wish us to learn. You must not use the word ‘poor’; they are described as the ‘lower income group’. When it comes to a question of freezing a workman’s wages, the Chancellor of the Exchequer speaks of ‘arresting increases in personal income’ . . . There is a lovely one about houses and homes. They are in future to be called ‘accommodation units’. I don’t know how we are to sing our old song ‘Home Sweet Home’. ‘Accommodation Unit, Sweet Accommodation Unit, There’s no place like our Accommodation Unit.’ I hope to live to see the British democracy spit all this rubbish from their lips.
Andrew Roberts (Churchill: Walking with Destiny)
Everything did change, faster than his fingers could type. What he had been too cautious to hope for was pulled from his dreams and made real on the television screen. At that momentous hour on December 26, 1991, as he watched the red flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—the empire “empire extending eleven times zones, from the Sea of Japan to the Baltic coast, encompassing more than a hundred ethnicities and two hundred languages; the collective whose security demanded the sacrifice of millions, whose Slavic stupidity had demanded the deportation of Khassan’s entire homeland; that utopian mirage cooked up by cruel young men who gave their mustaches more care than their morality; that whole horrid system that told him what he could be and do and think and say and believe and love and desire and hate, the system captained by Lenin and Zinoviev and Stalin and Malenkov and Beria and Molotov and Khrushchev and Kosygin and Mikoyan and Podgorny and Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko and Gorbachev, all of whom but Gorbachev he hated with a scorn no author should have for his subject, a scorn genetically encoded in his blood, inherited from his ancestors with their black hair and dark skin—as he watched that flag slink down the Kremlin flagpole for the final time, left limp by the windless sky, as if even the weather wanted to impart on communism this final disgrace, he looped his arms around his wife and son and he held them as the state that had denied him his life quietly died.
Anthony Marra (A Constellation of Vital Phenomena)
I remain basically a socialist. It is more relevant today because capitalism has reached its apex. It will begin to slide down or will dissolve or save itself through a Third World War to control the whole world through oil and the subservience of small countries like us and I don't like that. I am happy that Cardinal Sin stated very clearly that we must be for peace. We are for America but the good America, not the America today. The good America of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR is the America I love and admire. But the America today wants to control the economy of the world. The war in Iraq. . . is a war for oil, no matter how many millions will die so long as they can control Iraq which is the second largest oil-producing country in the world, second only to Saudi Arabia and its neighbors.
Luis Taruc
We must regard as deeply blameworthy before history the conduct not only of the British National and mainly Conservative Government, but of the Labour-Socialist and Liberal Parties, both in and out of office, during this fatal period. Delight in smooth-sounding platitudes, refusal to face unpleasant facts, desire for popularity and electoral success irrespective of the vital interests of the State, genuine love of peace and pathetic belief that love can be its sole foundation, obvious lack of intellectual vigour in both leaders of the British Coalition Government, marked ignorance of Europe and aversion from its problems in Mr. Baldwin, the strong and violent pacifism which at this time dominated the Labour-Socialist Party, the utter devotion of the Liberals to sentiment apart from reality, the failure and worse than failure of Mr. Lloyd George,
Winston S. Churchill (The Gathering Storm: The Second World War, Volume 1 (Winston Churchill World War II Collection))
Economies can be rebuilt, armies can be repopulated, but once a nation’s pride is gone it can almost never be restored. The loss of a nation’s honor is something not even centuries can repair. The next president must love America. The next president must embody unequivocally everything that is good about this country going back to its founding. The next president must be the exact opposite of Barack Obama. He must be a man of high character and strong commitment to American values, because he will be facing problems and issues that no U.S. leader has had to face since the years leading up to World War II. In the late 1930s—only a few years before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—our economy was still trying to recover from the Great Depression in the face of the policies of a big-government president, our military had been depleted, and our enemies were gathering strength and threatening war on many fronts.
Michael Savage (Trickle Down Tyranny: Crushing Obama's Dream of the Socialist States of America)
Their entitlement and their virtue are, in reality, ignoble lies. In fact, they are motivated by the same ambition and desire for power and gain as anyone else. They love money and sex and all forms of perversion as much as anyone else, and they are just as reluctant as the next guy to share what they have with others. In fact, they are the least compassionate, most uncharitable group in society. This, then, is the temptation of the socialists: they are tempted to annihilate their consciences to conceal the ugly truth about themselves. One fact they cannot face is that the only difference between them and capitalist entrepreneurs is that they seek unearned power, power without genuine accountability. As I will show, entrepreneurs are genuinely accountable to their customers, who exercise direct democracy: they vote every day with their purchases for the products that entrepreneurs supply. The socialists wish to answer to nobody. They are driven, as Nietzsche pointed out more than a century ago, by a nasty, vengeful “will to power.
Dinesh D'Souza (United States of Socialism: Who's Behind It. Why It's Evil. How to Stop It.)
Meanwhile one can observe on every side that dreary phenomenon, the middle-class person who is an ardent Socialist at twenty-five and a sniffish Conservative at thirty-five. In a way his recoil is natural enough–at any rate, one can see how his thoughts run. Perhaps a classless society doesn't mean a beatific state of affairs in which we shall all go on behaving exactly as before except that there will be no class-hatred and no snobbishness; perhaps it means a bleak world in which all our ideals, our codes, our tastes–our 'ideology', in fact–will have no meaning. Perhaps this class-breaking business isn't so simple as it looked! On the contrary, it is a wild ride into the darkness, and it may be that at the end of it the smile will be on the face of the tiger. With loving, though slightly patronizing smiles we set out to greet our proletarian brothers, and behold! our proletarian brothers–in so far as we understand them–are not asking for our greetings, they are asking us to commit suicide. When the bourgeois sees it in that form he takes to flight, and if his flight is rapid enough it may carry him to Fascism.
George Orwell (The Road to Wigan Pier)
New Rule: Conservatives have to stop complaining about Hollywood values. It's Oscar time again, which means two things: (1) I've got to get waxed, and (2) talk-radio hosts and conservative columnists will trot out their annual complaints about Hollywood: We're too liberal; we're out of touch with the Heartland; our facial muscles have been deadened with chicken botulism; and we make them feel fat. To these people, I say: Shut up and eat your popcorn. And stop bitching about one of the few American products--movies---that people all over the world still want to buy. Last year, Hollywood set a new box-office record: $16 billion worldwide. Not bad for a bunch of socialists. You never see Hollywood begging Washington for a handout, like corn farmers, or the auto industry, or the entire state of Alaska. What makes it even more inappropriate for conservatives to slam Hollywood is that they more than anybody lose their shit over any D-lister who leans right to the point that they actually run them for office. Sony Bono? Fred Thompson? And let'snot forget that the modern conservative messiah is a guy who costarred with a chimp. That's right, Dick Cheney. I'm not trying to say that when celebrities are conservative they're almost always lame, but if Stephen Baldwin killed himself and Bo Derrick with a car bomb, the headline the next day would be "Two Die in Car Bombing." The truth is that the vast majority of Hollywood talent is liberal, because most stars adhere to an ideology that jibes with their core principles of taking drugs and getting laid. The liebral stars that the right is always demonizing--Sean Penn and Michael Moore, Barbra Streisand and Alec Baldwin and Tim Robbins, and all the other members of my biweekly cocaine orgy--they're just people with opinions. None of them hold elective office, and liberals aren't begging them to run. Because we live in the real world, where actors do acting, and politicians do...nothing. We progressives love our stars, but we know better than to elect them. We make the movies here, so we know a well-kept trade secret: The people on that screen are only pretending to be geniuses, astronauts, and cowboys. So please don't hat eon us. And please don't ruin the Oscars. Because honestly, we're just like you: We work hard all year long, and the Oscars are really just our prom night. The tuxedos are scratchy, the limousines are rented, and we go home with eighteen-year-old girls.
Bill Maher (The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass)
Sometimes, as in the case of the copper companies, the nationalizations were achieved through legislation that won overwhelming support. (By now, no one in Chile loved the American companies; even the head of Chile’s Roman Catholic bishops declared that nationalization was right and just.) At other times the methods skirted or even overstepped the bounds of legality. The government would simply approve the seizures of farms and factories, one of those “loopholes” Allende was relying on. Perhaps the most important—and pernicious—method was by squeezing the companies economically, as he tried to do with El Mercurio. The government had the authority to approve price hikes and wage increases. Companies that were targets for takeovers were prohibited from raising their prices but were forced to raise their workers’ pay. Moreover, as the government extended its control of the banks, credit for distressed companies dried up. Forced bankruptcies were a favorite tool of Allende’s Socialists. And who was there to run these companies once they were taken over? Ambassador Davis reports: “Government-appointed managers were usually named on the basis of a political patronage system that would have put Tammany Hall to shame.” Many formerly profitable companies were soon incurring heavy losses. In the countryside, where peasants—often illiterate—were seizing control of the estates, there was resistance even to the simplest methods of accounting and cost calculation. As Allende told Debray, “We shall have real power when copper and steel are under our control, when saltpeter is genuinely under our control, when we have put far-reaching land reform measures into effect, when we control imports and exports through the state, when we have collectivized a major portion of our national production.” But it wasn’t just the economy that Allende was trying to control. He was also taking steps to centralize the government and restrict political freedom. He saw his most important political reform as replacing the bicameral legislature with a single chamber in order to strengthen the presidency and weaken congress’s ability to block his objectives. It would also have the power to override judicial decisions. He called the proposed new body the “People’s Assembly,” but he never gained sufficient support from the “people” to call a plebiscite on the question.
Barry Gewen (The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World)
What he had been too cautious to hope for was pulled from his dreams and made real on the television screen. At that momentous hour on December 26, 1991, as he watched the red flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—the empire extending eleven times zones, from the Sea of Japan to the Baltic coast, encompassing more than a hundred ethnicities and two hundred languages; the collective whose security demanded the sacrifice of millions, whose Slavic stupidity had demanded the deportation of Khassan’s entire homeland; that utopian mirage cooked up by cruel young men who gave their mustaches more care than their morality; that whole horrid system that told him what he could be and do and think and say and believe and love and desire and hate, the system captained by Lenin and Zinoviev and Stalin and Malenkov and Beria and Molotov and Khrushchev and Kosygin and Mikoyan and Podgorny and Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko and Gorbachev, all of whom but Gorbachev he hated with a scorn no author should have for his subject, a scorn genetically encoded in his blood, inherited from his ancestors with their black hair and dark skin—as he watched that flag slink down the Kremlin flagpole for the final time, left limp by the windless sky, as if even the weather wanted to impart on communism this final disgrace, he looped his arms around his wife and son and he held them as the state that had denied him his life quietly died.
Anthony Marra (A Constellation of Vital Phenomena)
Equality as a condition for the development of individuality was also the meaning of the concept in the philosophy of the Western Enlightenment. It meant (most clearly formulated by Kant) that no man must be the means for the ends of another man. That all men are equal inasmuch as they are ends, and only ends, and never means to each other. Following the ideas of the Enlightenment, Socialist thinkers of various schools defined equality as abolition of exploitation, of the use of man by man, regardless of whether this use were cruel or “human.” In
Erich Fromm (The Art of Loving)
Humans emerge from the womb like molten glass from a furnace. They can be spun, stretched and shaped with a surprising degree of freedom. This is why today we can educate our children to become Christian or Buddhist, capitalist or socialist, warlike or peace-loving.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
For what did the falsification of the original concept of Christian love, of the community of fate before God and of socialism lead to? By their fruits ye shall know them! The suppression of freedom of opinion, the persecution of the true Christians, the vile mass murders of the Inquisition and the burning of witches, the armed campaigns against the people of free and true Christian faith, the destruction of their towns and villages, the hauling away of their cattle and their goods, the destruction of their flourishing economies, and the condemnation of their leaders before tribunals, which, in their unrelenting hypocrisy, can only be described as blasphemous. That is the true face of those sanctimonious churches that have placed themselves between God and man, motivated by selfishness, personal greed for recognition and gain, and the ambition to maintain their high handed willfulness against Christ’s deep understanding of the necessity of a socialist community of men and nations.
Otto Wagener (Hitler: Memoirs Of A Confidant)
What is at stake at the present great turning point? An individualistic worldview is being replaced by a socialistic one! A thousand-year-old attitude toward life is being thrust aside by completely new concepts. “Such a change cannot be decreed by legislation! Nor can it be brought about by a ministry, no matter how homogeneously it is put together and how saturated and filled it is with the new ideas. “Such a transformation requires an inner conversion! A mental, a spiritual, an ethical, even a religious one! … “It is such a far-reaching and complete conversion that the adult is no longer capable of it. Only youth can be converted, newly aligned and adjusted to the socialist sense of obligation toward the community… “…when you observe the enthusiasm of youth, when the cheerful hands of an innocent child reach for you, then you will sense the inner conversion; then you will realize that a new faith is awakening out of the lethargy of a corrupt epoch and taking to the march — the faith in divine justice, in heavenly truth; the faith in an unworldly, paradisiacal future, where the lust for power, force, and enmity gives way to equality and fraternity, the spirit of sacrifice, love and loyalty, and the will to stand before the throne of the Almighty with the open heart of one ready to believe in God. And they [the youth] will have sufficient greatness to stammer out the prayer for their brothers and fathers, ‘Forgive them, Lord, for they knew not what they did.’ “It is on this basis alone that the new world can be built! To lay this groundwork is our task. Our own hopes can aim no further. We must leave some things to be done by those who come after us. Your work will be a signpost for the future, a witness to our great intention, but in our time it will not be crowned with realization.” He fell silent. His inner enthusiasm had driven the blood into his cheeks. His eyes glowed like bright lights. I thought of Strasser, of our plans. And I felt: Our thinking is so puny.
Otto Wagener (Hitler: Memoirs Of A Confidant)
concepts of social justice and natural order are the Organs and nerves of National Socialism but its PERSONALITY, its "religious" aspect-the thing that lifts it above any strictly Political philosophy-- its worshipful attitude toward Nature and a religious love of the Great gifts of an Unknown Creator.... Christianity, for instance, is a far higher thing than its rituals, the words of its prayers or any of its creeds. It is a SPIRITUAL STRIVING toward the believer's ideals of Spiritual Perfection. National Socialism is the same sort of striving toward ever higher and higher levels here on this earth... But just as the greatest Christian leaders have been those not preoccupied with details and rules but rather those who were "God intoxicated" with the highest ideals of the religion, the leaders among our National Socialist elite must share this fundamentally religious approach. For them the true meaning of our racial doctrine must be part of their idealistic "striving toward God".
George Lincoln Rockwell (White Power)
No, not yet. She continued forward. She’d never see the cabin again. Or anything or anyone for that matter. She would never know how the war would turn out, or see the National Socialists fall or that madman stand trial for his crimes. She thought of Hans, his beautiful face, the truth in his eyes, and the unimaginable courage in his heart. She hadn’t even had a chance to hold him one last time, to tell him that he was the reason that she believed that love could still exist in this grotesque world. They’d cut his head off, tossed it into the casket alongside his body, and laid him down beside his sister and his best friend.
Eoin Dempsey (White Rose, Black Forest)
This was much more akin to the Fabian-socialist model adhered to by many American progressives and “democratic socialists.” It was the call of evolution rather than revolution. It was the Marxist-communist-socialist call of public ownership of the means of production, but without Lenin’s love of violence.
Paul Kengor (The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism's Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration)
FIDELITY AND BETRAYAL He loved her from the time he was a child until the time he accompanied her to the cemetery; he loved her in his memories as well. That is what made him feel that fidelity deserved pride of place among the virtues: fidelity gave a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions. Franz often spoke about his mother to Sabina, perhaps even with a certain unconscious ulterior motive: he assumed that Sabina would be charmed by his ability to be faithful, that it would win her over. What he did not know was that Sabina was charmed more by betrayal than by fidelity. The word fidelity reminded her of her father, a small-town puritan, who spent his Sundays painting away at canvases of woodland sunsets and roses in vases. Thanks to him, she started drawing as a child. When she was fourteen, she fell in love with a boy her age. Her father was so frightened that he would not let her out of the house by herself for a year. One day, he showed her some Picasso reproductions and made fun of them. If she couldn't love her fourteen-year-old schoolboy, she could at least love cubism. After completing school, she went off to Prague with the euphoric feeling that now at last she could betray her home. Betrayal. From tender youth, we are told by father and teacher that betrayal is the most heinous offense imaginable. But what is betrayal? Betrayal means breaking ranks. Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown. Sabina knew of nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown. Though a student at the Academy of Fine Arts, she was not allowed to paint like Picasso. It was the period when so-called socialist realism was prescribed and the school manufactured Portraits of Communist statesmen. Her longing to betray her father remained unsatisfied: Communism was merely another father, a father equally strict and limited, a father who forbade her love (the times were puritanical) and Picasso, too. And if she married a second-rate actor, it was only because he had a reputation for being eccentric and was unacceptable to both fathers. Then her mother died. The day following her return to Prague from the funeral, she received a telegram saying that her father had taken his life out of grief. Suddenly she felt pangs of conscience: Was it really so terrible that her father had painted vases filled with roses and hated Picasso? Was it really so reprehensible that he was afraid of his fourteen-year-old daughter's coming home pregnant? Was it really so laughable that he could not go on living without his wife? And again she felt a longing to betray: betray her own betrayal. She announced to her husband (whom she now considered a difficult drunk rather than an eccentric) that she was leaving him. But if we betray B., for whom we betrayed A., it does not necessarily follow that we have placated A. The life of a divorcee-painter did not in the least resemble the life of the parents she had betrayed. The first betrayal is irreparable. It calls forth a chain reaction of further betrayals, each of which takes us farther and farther away from the point of our original betrayal.
Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
why is it that all these desperate socialists and communists are at the same time such incredible misers, acquirers, property-lovers, so much so that the more socialist a man is, the further he goes, the more he loves property … why is it?
Fyodor Dostoevsky (Demons)
A colt can trot shortly after birth; a kitten leaves its mother to forage on its own when it is just a few weeks old. Human babies are helpless, dependent for many years on their elders for sustenance, protection and education. This fact has contributed greatly both to humankind’s extraordinary social abilities and to its unique social problems. Lone mothers could hardly forage enough food for their offspring and themselves with needy children in tow. Raising children required constant help from other family members and neighbours. It takes a tribe to raise a human. Evolution thus favoured those capable of forming strong social ties. In addition, since humans are born underdeveloped, they can be educated and socialised to a far greater extent than any other animal. Most mammals emerge from the womb like glazed earthenware emerging from a kiln – any attempt at remoulding will only scratch or break them. Humans emerge from the womb like molten glass from a furnace. They can be spun, stretched and shaped with a surprising degree of freedom. This is why today we can educate our children to become Christian or Buddhist, capitalist or socialist, warlike or peace-loving.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Most mammals emerge from the womb like glazed earthenware emerging from a kiln – any attempt at remoulding will only scratch or break them. Humans emerge from the womb like molten glass from a furnace. They can be spun, stretched and shaped with a surprising degree of freedom. This is why today we can educate our children to become Christian or Buddhist, capitalist or socialist, warlike or peace-loving. We
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Rather than calling for the white citizens of Little Rock to show Christian love toward the black students, Rice mocked “the wholly selfish and political attitude of the NAACP radical leaders, by socialists and communists, by modernist ‘do-gooders’ who have no other gospel but questions of race and pacifism and labor unions.” He continued:   The nine Negro children were selected by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and on their instructions and to make a public issue.. wholly for political and propaganda purposes…and not for the good of the students themselves, attempted to transfer to Central High School…The Negroes already had a high school equally as good, newer and less crowded…To force integration, President Eisenhower called out units of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, who took over somewhat as “occupation troops.” Citizens were barred from certain streets. Some [whites] were clubbed in the head by soldiers. The nine Negro students went to Central High School.[176]
Andrew Himes (The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family)
February 25 The Destitution of Service Though the more abundantly I love you, the less I be loved. 2 Corinthians 12:15 Natural love expects some return, but Paul says—“I do not care whether you love me or not, I am willing to destitute myself completely, not merely for your sakes, but that I may get you to God.” “For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor.” Paul’s idea of service is exactly along that line—“I do not care with what extravagance I spend myself, and I will do it gladly.” It was a joyful thing to Paul. The ecclesiastical idea of a servant of God is not Jesus Christ’s idea. His idea is that we serve Him by being the servants of other men. Jesus Christ out-socialists the socialists. He says that in His Kingdom he that is greatest shall be the servant of all. The real test of the saint is not preaching the gospel, but washing disciples’ feet, that is, doing the things that do not count in the actual estimate of men, but count everything in the estimate of God. Paul delighted to spend himself out for God’s interests in other people, and he did not care what it cost. We come in with our economical notions—“Suppose God wants me to go there—what about the salary? What about the climate? How shall I be looked after? A man must consider these things.” All that is an indication that we are serving God with a reserve. The apostle Paul had no reserve. Paul focuses Jesus Christ’s idea of a New Testament saint in his life, viz.: not one who proclaims the Gospel merely, but one who becomes broken bread and poured-out wine in the hands of Jesus Christ for other lives.
Oswald Chambers (My Utmost for His Highest)
Indeed, very few successful socialist propagandists ever bothered to focus on the empirical case for socialism. Rather, when trying to sell socialism as a policy or a movement, its preachers testify about “social justice,” “humane policies,” “fairness,” and “equality.” In short, socialism—be it Marxist, Fabian, nationalistic, progressive—is merely one of many pseudo-empirical rationalizations of the deeper psychological impulse of Blair’s “social-ism.” The true case for socialism is not to be found in GDP or employment numbers, but in the promise of leaping out of History into a better society where we are all loved and respected as members of the same family.
Jonah Goldberg
There was a Race Relations Act, supported by socialists and conservatives alike, which made the incitement of racial hatred a crime but there was no corresponding Class Relations Act making it illegal to incite class hatred.
Joseph Pearce (Race With the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love)
Like Marx before her, Zino had a great theory that hinged on completely unrealistic, even idealistic, assumptions. Capitalists are people, no more or less trustworthy than socialists. People choose the path of least resistance, and for most people that includes cutting corners. No, most CEOs don't read the Bible. But they do love to quote it. It convinces the masses to cede all power over to corporations, and that any failure is simply their own fault. It argues well - seductively - for the virtual elimination of government and any sort of regulation of power. People cling to the 'free hand of the market' as a perfect god. They're so eager for a solution that can be neatly applied to every situation that they're desperate to overlook it's faults.
Nicholas Lamar Soutter (The Water Thief)
This is a question that extends beyond theology, for it involves the same principle by which humanity organized itself on a 44- year cold war precipice, from 1945 to 1989. No one moved back from the sheer drop but stood, armed and balanced, at the very edge — each side daring and betting against the other’s nerve. What was called the balance of power involved massive nuclear armament; and the principle of armament was not deployment and use, but the threat of it. It was the careful preparation of a threat to do great evil, ostensibly (on both key sides) for the sake of a foundation good — whether for the good of democracy and ‘American values’ or the socialist values of the proletariat. But, just as economics has become a discipline in love with its key instrument of econometrics — the elegance of the equation is everything and its applicability somewhat less so — so the balance of power became a love affair not with power and its possible final triumph, but with the balance.
Stephen Chan (The End of Certainty: Towards a New Internationalism)
Most mammals emerge from the womb like glazed earthenware emerging from a kiln –any attempt at remoulding will only scratch or break them. Humans emerge from the womb like molten glass from a furnace. They can be spun, stretched and shaped with a surprising degree of freedom. This is why today we can educate our children to become Christian or Buddhist, capitalist or socialist, warlike or peace-loving.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
To a friend, in an unguarded moment, he [Maxim Gorky, 1932] declared his ambition: simply to portray the world and man as they were, without the myth of love, ‘repudiating nothing, praising nothing’; repudiation was unjust, while praise was premature—‘for we live in chaos and ourselves are fragments of chaos.’ He compared his desire with Einstein, ‘trying to alter radically our representation of the universe.
Dan Levin (Stormy Petrel: The Life and Work of Maxim Gorky)
indeed members of the Socialist Party and representatives on the political left condemned, even protested, the brutalities against Jews
Rebecca Frankel (Into the Forest: A Holocaust Story of Survival, Triumph, and Love)
We had climate change, we had Black people being murdered by police officers, we had our usual national menu of violence against women, we had all kinds of discrimination happening, and if you're still here with me for part 3, then you know the list: all the societal evils that blossom at the bottom of the barrel in a population and fester and spread the cankers of hate and fear and greed. The qualities in humanity against which some of us strive to progress, and thereby improve, in the hopes that one day nobody will have to endure being systemically shat upon. Accordingly, and accurately, this relative stance causes us to be labeled "progressives," but it doesn't stop at that, apparently. We are also radical, socialist, communist, Marxist, leftist libtards whom our detractors love to see cry.
Nick Offerman (Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside)
It must be said that none of the historical experiences of revolutionary dual power have resulted in the establishment of long-term democratic or socialist societies in which the historically oppressed classes genuinely wield power. All have either been crushed by a resurgent old order or ultimately drained of any democratic content by a new revolutionary elite. At the same time, these fleeting experiences still represent the closest humanity has come to realizing the revolutionary vision of a truly free society.
Roy San Filippo (A New World In Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation)
I know that it takes guts to become a socialist during our generation, because the majority of people are in love with money.
Mwanandeke Kindembo (Destiny of Liberty)
A bigger problem is that a significant part of the Green New Deal—its guaranteed living wage, incomes for those unwilling to work, state guarantees for housing and education, government-run universal healthcare—has little or nothing to do with the climate. This seems to be socialism hiding behind an environmentalist banner. And this is of course why socialists like AOC and Bernie love it. They neither know nor care if the planet is getting hotter or colder.
Dinesh D'Souza (United States of Socialism: Who's Behind It. Why It's Evil. How to Stop It.)
Blair, Tony – icon of revolutionary socialist ideology or Thatcher’s love-child who acts as a tree for George Bush’s poodle. You choose.
Nick Edwards (In Stitches: The Highs and Lows of Life as an A&E Doctor)
Lenin's analysis in The Development of Capitalism in Russia is a kind of profession de foi in a new and powerful idiom. To appeal to the intelligentsia, modern doctrines must combine faith and realism, or science, and Lenin's faith in the correctness of his "science" sustained him through lean years. The notion of faith raises the vexing issue of resemblances between Marxism and earlier Judeo-Christian traditions. A rough human sense that there will be justice, that wrongs will be righted, that sufferings and humiliations will be revenged, that the rich will not enter either a heavenly kingdom or earthly socialist paradise, underlies a great many religious and secular doctrines, expressed in a variety of "sacred" and "scientific" idioms. Another common denominator of such doctrines is their identification of victims who are chosen to be saved and oppressors who are doomed, whether by God's love and justice or history's dialectic. Needless to say, this kind of hopeful and militant vision, when sustained over a long period of time, yields a history of struggle, frustration, adaptation, sectarianism, and defection. Like their religious predecessors, the new secular movements spread out over a spectrum of positions reflecting defeated expectations, changed historical conditions, and the psychologies of individuals creating the movements' doctrines and strategies.
Philip Pomper (Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin: The Intelligentsia and Power)
Most mammals emerge from the womb like glazed earthenware emerging from a kiln – any attempt at remoulding will only scratch or break them. Humans emerge from the womb like molten glass from a furnace. They can be spun, stretched and shaped with a surprising degree of freedom. This is why today we can educate our children to become Christian or Buddhist, capitalist or socialist, warlike or peace-loving.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
I was a National Socialist and I remain one…. The Germany of today is no longer a great nation, it has become a province of Europe. That is why, at the first opportunity, I shall settle elsewhere, in France no doubt. I don’t particularly care for Frenchmen, but I love France. Of all things, the materialism of my compatriots causes me pain.
Jochen Peiper
This, then is the ultimate objective of the socialist left in America: to brainwash us through propaganda and to terrify us into submission so that we all become Winston, cowering and whimpering at first and ultimately giving in, not only on the outside but also on the inside, our ideals crushed, our dignity gone, finally embracing our abusers and captors by saying in unison, “I love Big Brother.” At that point, the Left is content and our reeducation is complete. -chapter 6
Dinesh D'Souza
Everything about Paris fascinated me, including the politics. After the revolution, things were unstable but hopeful: new movements were springing up everywhere. One of them embraced the socialist ideal that property should be shared; another proposed that God was not a paternalistic figure but, rather, an androgynous one. There was communal living, and communal loving, as well.
Elizabeth Berg (The Dream Lover: A Novel of George Sand)
First of all, the National Health Service, the Welfare State. What pride in it, what elation – and what confidence! The best thing was still the young doctors setting up group practices. Most but not all were socialists of various kinds. Memories of the thirties were close, documented by The Stars Look Down, Love on the Dole, The Citadel, novels which everyone had read. Whole families could be brought low because of the illness of one member. That terrible poverty in the 1930s, that cruel indifference to suffering on the part of Britain’s rulers – but now there was the welfare state. Pensions meant old age was no longer a threat. (Forty years later a government can say blandly, But we can’t afford it – and cut benefits that the citizens imagined they had been paying for. Has anyone ever thought of suing a government that reneges on its promises?
Doris Lessing (Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 - 1962)
Page 78 The family sucks the juice out of everything around it, leaving other institutions stunted and distorted. Page 75 Deep-seated differences between the sexes do tend to be reproduced from generation to generation by the fact that children are reared by a pair of differentiated parents and the parameters of their sexual orientation are set in the context of their early relations with those parents. But our unbalanced pattern of sexuality is also an integral part of a thriving marriage system that still enshrines male power and female dependence. Until that form of family disappears, sexual enjoyment will continue to be a male privilege and it will continue to take the form of sexual possession. Clearly, then, it remains necessary, as the early socialists recognized, to separate sex love from these economic ties and allow it to flourish in its own right. Page 52-53 The Oneida community, founded in New York State in 1848, consciously rejected the family and marriage as being inimical to a full communal life. The biblical text, ‘In heaven they neither marry nor are given in marriage’, was taken as justification for ‘complex marriage’ in which all the men and women of the community were joined. Heterosexual relations between any of them were encouraged; long-term pairing was discouraged. Children were cared for in a children’s house soon after they were weaned, visiting their own parents only once or twice a week. Their founder John Humphrey Noyes saw a very clear contradiction between intense family feelings and community feeling. He believed that ‘the great problem of socialism now is, whether the existence of the marital family is compatible with that of the universal family, which the term “community” signifies.
Michèle Barrett (The Anti-Social Family)
Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism. It preaches a contempt for the working class unexampled for centuries past, and it dresses its members in a uniform which was at one time peculiar to manual workers and was adopted for that reason. It systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty. Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture, and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely.
George Orwell (1984)
A Community in Conversation Last week I went to the Chill Out and Proud festival to sell my books of poetry. It was not my first gay pride festival, but it was Somerset’s. There are a few observations that I had this particular day. My observations have very little to do with morality and more to do with wanting to live in a community that can communicate. My first observation was that my family and I were on high alert and felt a sense of fear for the first time in my life in the town of Somerset. It was not the people attending the festival that left us feeling uneasy, but rather the protestors. My second observation is that there were two groups of what would seem to be opposites, Christians and Neo Nazi white supremacists, standing side by side holding signs and yelling into an otherwise quiet and peaceful group of citizens. I understand everyone’s right to protest and be heard but the method of communicating our differences should be a checkpoint of self reflection. I had a calm conversation with one of the protesters who approached me. I asked him to consider that yelling at people might result in them putting their guards up, increasing the tension, and in turn, people yelling back. It’s a cyclical deterioration where no one hears or understands one another. Anger and fear are the brothers that are born of this kind of relationship. I would say the same to those who yell back at the protesters. We are going to be a community of diverse people who do not think the same or live the same lifestyle, but if we are going to live together peaceably, we need to find a better way to disagree. My last observation is that the protestor also asked me why I was there, did I have a family member who is gay? He stated, “You don’t just come to these things for no reason”. I replied, “Honestly, I did start going and taking my family to gay pride festivals just to be amongst other cultures. It’s good to get to know people who are different from yourself.” The world’s a big place and you may find that you have more in common with people than you think or, in this case, that you know more gay people than you think. I would like to say the same to you. Somerset is a lot more diverse than you think and we have a lot more in common than you think. The only way we will love our neighbor as ourselves is by getting to know our neighbors, even in the midst of our differences. Protesting often times takes a stance of offense; a form of violence that may not always be physical but is a form of violence all the same. Everyone has the right to be heard, but only if they are willing to really listen to others in an attempt to understand. As an atheist, I have never stood outside a church and disrupted their gathering, although I am willing to have a conversation about how my journey brought me here and how you have come to this point. For me to enter a gathering and protest is an offensive move that would cause the people involved to put up walls. It would not be welcomed and I would not do it. It would be a hindrance to us actually knowing and understanding each other. The only way to truly know someone is by being with them, by conversation. We will not agree. There are too many of us and if we agreed on every point of life then that would be another checkpoint for self reflection. I am just asking us to practice a certain amount of hospitality no matter your beliefs about each other, whether gay or straight; whether Christian, Agnostic, or Atheist; whether Democrat, Republican, or Democratic Socialist; whether you’re the protestor or the protested against; in person or on Facebook, let us contemplate mindful listening, empathy, patience, kindness, and the well-being of people who are different than yourself. Eric Overby Eric_o_84@hotmail.com
Eric Overby
It wasn’t a “white person” who ordered the internment of Japanese-Americans based on nothing other than the color of their skin and the blood in their veins. That was the longest-serving, most powerful and best-loved Democrat of all, Franklin Roosevelt and it should not go unnoticed that it is this same Roosevelt who remains so beloved a figure in today’s Democratic party that, when Ocasio-Cortez sought to sell her massive one-size-fits-all “environmental” programs to her fellow Democrats, she did so by naming her bill after the Socialist/collectivist/ racist Roosevelt’s signature policies, “The New Deal.” That’s not a “dog whistle,” that’s a bullhorn.
Evan Sayet (The Woke Supremacy: An Anti-Socialist Manifesto)
Whenever the Democratic Socialist points to a nation where Socialism has succeeded, he invariably ignores the elephants in the room of China, Russia and Nazi Germany, and references only the tiny Nordic states of Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark and Norway. These are odd choices since none of them is actually Socialist. Not in the slightest. In fact, they all fall far to the right on today’s American political spectrum. Their economic system is the same as that of the United States – free-market capitalism. They are proud Nationalists who love their country, respect the borders of their neighbors and expect their borders to be respected by others.
Evan Sayet (The Woke Supremacy: An Anti-Socialist Manifesto)
This has always been a city of thoughtful rogues, greedy do-gooders, irreverent theologians, socialist entrepreneurs, hedonistic environmentalists, sensitive newspapermen, philosophical rockers, and high-minded sensualists. And through the years, these mavericks have carried, like an unruly band of Olympic torchbearers, the rebellious, restless, life-affirming fire that was lit in 1849.
Gary Kamiya (Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco)
Mao, Lenin, Marx, Pol Pot, Chavez, and Castro seek to stir any lingering fears of socialist governments,
Joseph Love (Propaganda, Brutalism, & Fords: Examining the Council of Economic Advisers' Attack on Progress)
Once you start asking, Why has human history created an economic system that loves profit and power more than people, which will always lead to disasters like the mine collapse and the violence that followed?--once you start asking, What went so wrong in society that bastards like Sheriff Davies are allowed to exist in the first place?--the answers taste like sand in your mouth. It's all so far back that the response becomes "Because that's how it is." I ain't mad at Paul; I'm mad at the world that put us here, I've been mad at the world for a long time. It's hard not to be mad at the world when you're eleven years old and everyone you know is suffering, when your mother cries herself to sleep and you can recognize your father's hospital room by the smell of his blood. But the summer before my sophomore year, I learned my great-great-grandfather was a socialist and suddenly I had the words for why I wanted to burn it all down. Because none of this is real. It's real but it ain't real, it ain't real the way mountains or the rings inside a tree are real. You can't open a book on the laws of physics and find a chapter "Exploiting Workers for Profit and Killing Them When They Ask You to Stop." It's fake! Someone made it up! Workers are exploited, rent is astronomical, the cost of healthcare is life-destroying not because they are the path a river carves through a canyon, but because some capitalist fuckers decided they wanted it this way.
Andrew Joseph White, Compound Fracture
The dreamers of ideals [?] – socialists, altruists, and humanitarians of whatever ilk – make me physically sick to my stomach. They’re idealists with no ideal, thinkers with no thought. They’re enchanted by life’s surface because their destiny is to love rubbish, which floats on the water and they think it’s beautiful, because scattered shells float on the water too.
Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet)
The headlines on a few recent U.S. opinion surveys were basically 'These Crazy Kids Love Socialism,' but my takeaway from the data is that younger people tend to be more ideologically nonbinary. A survey of people under thirty by Harvard's Kennedy School of Government found that majorities said they 'don't support' capitalism or socialism, with small fractions who 'identify as' either socialist (16 percent) or capitalist (19 percent).
Kurt Andersen (Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History)
There, in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, Socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than textbooks a foot thick could give him,
James Hollis (Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up)