Communism

Quotes about Communism

(in alphabetic order, by author)

• "Capitalism and communism stand at opposite poles. Their essential difference is this: The communist, seeing the rich man and his fine home, says: 'No man should have so much.' The capitalist, seeing the same thing, says: 'All men should have as much.' "
  –Phelps Adams

• "Today the primary threat to the liberties of the American people comes not from communism, foreign tyrants or dictators. It comes from the tendency on our own shores to centralize power, to trust bureaucracies rather than people."
  –George H. Allen

• "Communism and fascism or nazism, although poles apart in their intellectual content, are similar in this, that both have emotional appeal to the type of personality that takes pleasure in being submerged in a mass movement and submitting to superior authority."
  –James A. C. Brown

• "Marge, I agree with you – in theory. In theory, communism works. In theory."
  –Homer Simpson

• "From the days of Spartacus, Weishophf, Karl Marx, Trotski, Belacoon, Rosa Luxembourg, and Ema Goldman, this world conspiracy has been steadily growing. This conspiracy played a definite recognizable role in the tragedy of the French revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th Century. And now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their head and have become the undisputed masters of that enormous empire."
  "A communist is like a crocodile – when it opens its mouth you cannot tell whether it is trying to smile or preparing to eat you up."
  "The substance of the eminent Socialist gentlemen's speech is that making a profit is a sin. It is my belief that the real sin is taking a loss!"
  –Winston Churchill

• "One strength of the communist system of the East is that it has some of the character of a religion and inspires the emotions of a religion."
  "Any power must be an enemy of mankind which enslaves the individual by power and by force, whether it arises under the Fascist or the Communist flag. All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual."
  –Albert Einstein

• "Catholics and Communists have committed great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate."
  "If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another name?"
  –Graham Greene

• "In October 1917, we parted with the old world, rejecting it once and for all. We are moving toward a new world, a world of Communism. We shall never turn off that road."
  "Gentlemen, comrades, do not be concerned about all you hear about Glasnost and Perestroika and democracy in the coming years. They are primarily for outward consumption. There will be no significant internal changes in the Soviet Union, other than for cosmetic purposes. Our purpose is to disarm the Americans and let them fall asleep."
  "The goal of my life was to destroy communism."
  –Mikhail Gorbachev

• "Communism possesses a language which every people can understand – its elements are hunger, envy, and death."
  –Heinrich Heine

• "Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both."
  –John Fitzgerald Kennedy

• "We can't expect the American People to jump from capitalism to communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of socialism, until they awaken one day to find that they have communism."
  –Nikita Khrushchev

• "We must hate – hatred is the basis of communism. Children must be taught to hate their parents if they are not communists."
  "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country."
  –Vladimir Ilich Lenin

• "A strong USA defense brought down the Soviet Union. It was Ronald Reagan – first in a speech at Notre Dame University in May 1981, then his 'Evil Empire' speech of March 1983 – who most eloquently declared communism's imminent demise. Reagan was right. And even Soviet officials attribute Ronald Reagan's rhetoric and foreign policy to bringing down that 'evil empire.' By Christmas Day, 1990, the Soviet Union ceased to exist."
  –Rush Limbaugh

• "A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of Communism."
  "The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletariat parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, the overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat."
  "The theory of the Communism may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property."
  "Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that is does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriation."
  "Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. Working men of all countries, unite!"
  –Karl Marx

• "The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians"
  –Henry Louis Mencken

• "In Germany they first came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me – and by that time no one was left to speak up."
  –Martin Niemoller

• "How do you tell a communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin."
  "The years ahead will be great ones for our country, for the cause of freedom and the spread of civilization. The West will not contain Communism, it will transcend Communism. We will not bother to denounce it, we'll dismiss it as a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written."
  "In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis – a crisis where the demands of the economic order are colliding directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West, but in the home of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union ... [Communism will be] left on the ash heap of history."
  "The Soviet Union is an Evil Empire, and Soviet communism is the focus of evil in the modern world."
  –Ronald Reagan

• "Communism is like Prohibition, it's a good idea but it won't work"
  –Will Rogers

• "I do not believe in Communism any more than you do but there is nothing wrong with the Communists in this country; several of the best friends I have got are Communists"
  –Franklin D. Roosevelt

• "Don't forget: Communist are the Nazis of Eastern Europe."
  –Vladimir J. Rott , 2004, in a discussion – "why we must face facts and not look away to be able to overcome totalitarian past in Europe"

• "At the end of a century that has seen the evils of communism, Nazism and other modern tyrannies, the impulse to centralize power remains amazingly persistent."
  –Joseph Sobran

• "For us in Russia communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion."
  "I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either."
  "In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State."
  –Alexander Solzhenitsyn

• "Communism is the corruption of a dream of justice."
  "Communism is the death of the soul. It is the organization of total conformity – in short, of tyranny – and it is committed to making tyranny universal.
  –Adlai E. Stevenson

• "Communists always say that Capitalism leaves holes for crime, poverty and a higher society and that it is wrong. Communists do an even worse job at correcting this. Capitalism has a mission to give every person everything they want, and right now we are set out to fulfill that mission. All we lack is a means."
  –Cole Stewart

• "We first fought the heathens in the name of religion, then Communism, and now in the name of drugs and terrorism. Our excuses for global domination always change."
  –Serj Tankian

• "Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy."
  –Mao Tse-tung

• "It all came from there."
  –Lech Walesa , pointing to a TV when a reporter asked him why communism fell

• "We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny. ... The most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witch hunts, beginning to call anybody they don't like a Communist."
  –E. B. White

• "Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff."
  –Frank Zappa