In later years, and especially after the war, I can recall several pleasant and, to me, memorable talks on politics, particularly about Ireland and about Socialism. I think these encounters cannot have been displeasing to him, for he (George Bernard Shaw) was kind enough to give me a copy of his Magnum Opus, ‘The Intelligent […]
Socialism Quotes
I was guilty of judging capitalism by its operations and socialism by its hopes and aspirations; capitalism by its works and socialism by its literature.
For people of a certain ideological disposition, socialism is the name of their desire, and nothing can discredit that desire. Although expressing confidence in history’s vindication of that desire, the desire itself escapes all of history’s falsifications… The socialist revisionists we will have always with us, for the desire becomes more demanding as the prospect […]
All men are created equal’ says the American Declaration of Independence. ‘All men shall be kept equal’ say the Socialists.
When the war closed – we were challenged with a peace-time choice between the American system of rugged individualism and a European philosophy of diametrically opposed doctrines – doctrines of paternalism and state socialism.
Then there was communism’s weak-tea sister, socialism. Socialists maintained that we shouldn’t take all the money away from all the people since all the people don’t have money. We should take all the money away from only the people who make money. Then, when we run out of that, we could take more money from […]
I was a Socialist for two weeks but when a couple of Socialists assured me I had no right to think differently from any other Socialist and then quarrelled with each other about what Socialism meant, I ran away.
In my own passage out of the left, nearly twenty years ago, it occurred to me that my revolutionary comrades never addressed themselves to the obvious questions for social reformers: “What makes a society work?” Which is the preamble to “What will make this society work?” In all the socialist literature I had read, there […]
The Tenth Commandment sends a message to socialists, to egalitarians,. to people obsessed with fairness… to everyone who believes that wealth should be redistributed. And the message is clear and concise: Go to hell.
Did medical care and a bare sufficiency of rice and beans render freedom superfluous? Was I wrong to conclude from the fact that no refugees ever sought asylum in Cuba, that whatever its achievements, Cuban socialism was not what anybody wanted if offered a choice?
