quotations about communism
It is wholly wrong to blame Marx for what was done in his name, as it is to blame Jesus for what was done in his.
TONY BENN
The Benn Heresy
The world would not be in such a snarl, had Marx been Groucho instead of Karl.
IRVING BERLIN
attributed, Words from the Wise
The philosophy produced by the spirit of communism is a rubbish heap -- though to archeologists even rubbish heaps can be of interest.
LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI
Is God Happy?: Selected Essays
I do not think the rise and spread of communism is causally explicable in the same way as drought or floods are explicable. Viewed in retrospect, all great historical events seem to have been determined by circumstances, and this holds true also for the sudden eruption of great religious movements. With hindsight we can always find causes. But the fragility of such explanations becomes evident when we consider that if they really laid bare all the mechanisms and sufficient conditions of historical change, we would be able to predict them. But we cannot. Communism was born as a quasi-religious movement, i.e., as the ideological expression of the need for ultimate salvation. This need is probably a permanent and ineradicable element of all civilizations, but its presence alone does not explain why, at certain times and in certain places, it comes to the fore in the form of intense historical convulsions, engulfing enormous numbers of people and leading to unexpected and violent upheavals which overturn the existing order.
LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI
Is God Happy?: Selected Essays
Rationalism was transformed under communism into the idea of slavery. And romantic and early socialist strains -- the search for lost community and human solidarity, the protest against social disintegration caused by the industrial revolution and urbanization -- developed, under communism, into caricature: solidarity imposed by force, in an attempt to create a fake, merely ostensible unity -- the unity of despotism.
LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI
"Communism as a Cultural Force"
What is a Communist? One who has yearnings
For equal division of unequal earnings.
EBENEZER ELLIOT
"Epigram"
Communism is like an autoimmune disorder; it doesn't do the killing itself, but it weakens the system so much that the victim is left helpless and unable to fight off anything else.
GARRY KASPAROV
Winter is Coming
We Communists are all dead men on leave.
EUGEN LEVIN
Verso Book of Dissent
Since the communists cannot enter upon the decisive struggle between themselves and the bourgeoisie until the bourgeoisie is in power, it follows that it is in the interest of the communists to help the bourgeoisie to power as soon as possible in order the sooner to be able to overthrow it.
FRIEDRICH ENGELS
Principles of Communism
We are talking here about the future: about the lives of people in the world without wars, without social oppression, without national inequality, without suppression of human's abilities. In other word, it is about the future that we all call Communism.
ANDREI TARKOVSKY
letter to the central committee of the Communist Party of Soviet Union, October 20, 1970
Communism is a form of society where the less people have to eat, the more they have to swallow.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Communism, being the lay form of Catholicism, and indeed meaning the same thing, has never had any lack of chaplains.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
The Intelligent Women's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism
Wherever the carcass is, there shall come the vultures ... out of the mountain fastnesses, the rocky crags, the vultures of the sky come down to this glittering rottenness in order to devour it. These winged creatures are a kind of avenger and a punisher. They are a judgment upon death and corruption. Just as soon as corruption sets in, these winged monsters appear shrieking and croaking and winging their way to death itself.... Whenever a civilization begins to die morally or spiritually, then there begin to appear vultures. That is the mission of Communism in the world. Communism is the scavenger of a decaying civilization.
FULTON SHEEN
"Role of Communism"
The other day, someone told me the difference between a democracy and a "people's democracy" [communism]. It's the same as the difference between a jacket and a straitjacket.
RONALD REAGAN
speech, Dec. 10, 1986
There is not so much difference between the ideologies of capitalism and communism, you know. The difference is simple. Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, and communism is the reverse.
JOHN GARDNER
The Man from Barbarossa
I get on very well with honest and incorrigible Communists, for I see them as men living on borrowed time. At any moment they may be swinging from a convenient tree. But ex-Communists I cannot stomach. I distrust converts of any sort, and a man who has been converted twice, first to the Marxian whimwham and then to the even worse nonsense that usually follows, seems to me to be carrying his right to make an ass of himself too far.
H. L. MENCKEN
Life Magazine, Aug. 5, 1946
All the world's a stage, with Communism trying to turn it into a puppet show.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Across the world academics still clung to the words and ideas of Marx and Engels and even Lenin. Fools. There were even those who said that Communism had been tried in the wrong country; that Russia had been too far backward to make those wonderful ideas work.
TOM CLANCY
Rainbow Six
Communism is the flower of idleness.
G. TICKNOR
attributed, Day's Collacon
This was 1990, the year that communism died in Europe and it seemed strange to me that in all the words that were written about the fall of the iron curtain, nobody anywhere lamented that it was the end of a noble experiment. I know that communism never worked and I would have disliked living under it myself but none the less it seems that there was a kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that appeared to work was one based on self interest and greed.
BILL BRYSON
Neither Here Nor There