Communism Quotes

“No one has the right to place one human being in a position of political power over another.”
― Wendy McElroy

“Politically, he was a humanitarian who did know right from left and was trapped uncomfortably between the two. He was constantly defending his Communist friends to his right-wing enemies and his right-wing friends to his Communist enemies, and he was thoroughly detested by both groups, who never defended him to anyone because they thought he was a dope.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“And even in the fever of epidemic arrests, when people leaving for work said farewell to their families every day, because they could not be certain they would return at night, even then almost no one tried to run away and only in rare cases did people commit suicide. And that was exactly what was required. A submissive sheep is a find for a wolf.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“[The] tremendous and still accelerating development of science and technology has not been accompanied by an equal development in social, economic, and political patterns...We are now...only beginning to explore the potentialities which it offers for developments in our culture outside technology, particularly in the social, political and economic fields. It is safe to predict that...such social inventions as modern-type Capitalism, Fascism, and Communism will be regarded as primitive experiments directed toward the adjustment of modern society to modern methods”
― Ralph Linton

“Stalin goes to visit one of the collectives outside of Moscow,” began Kolya in his joke-telling voice. “Wants to see how they’re getting on with the latest Five-Year Plan. ‘Tell me, comrade,’ he asks one farmer. ‘How did the potatoes do this year?’ ‘Very well, Comrade Stalin. If we piled them up, they would reach God.’ ‘But God does not exist, Comrade Farmer.’ ‘Nor do the potatoes, Comrade Stalin.”
― David Benioff, City of Thieves

“But the person responsible - he wasn't suffering. We were.
Our hero, Draculescu, sat in his cardboard castle wearing a hollow crown, surrounding himself with clapping men who bowed to him as the Golden Man of the Carpathians while his people suffered, starved, and lived in terror.”
― Ruta Sepetys, I Must Betray You

“My contention is that good men (not bad men) consistently acting upon that position would act as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants. They might in some respects act even worse. Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment

“Never give up on learning because what you put up there in your brain,” he indicated my head with his index finger, “the Communists won’t ever be able to take away from you.”
― Teodor Flonta, A Luminous Future

“He thought of his wife, of his son, of his youth. He thought of life. He thought of death and then he thought of life again.”
― Teodor Flonta, A Luminous Future

“Communism as I see it has no place in the United States, and the American people will not stand for its teachings.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“They still possess virtues which might cause shame to most Christians. No hospitals are needed among them, because there are neither mendicants nor paupers as long as there are any rich people among them. Their kindness, humanity, and courtesy not only make them liberal with what they have, but cause them to possess hardly anything except in common. A whole village must be without corn before any individual can be obliged to endure privation. They divide the produce of their fisheries equally with all who come”
― Reuben Gold Thwaites, The Jesuit relations and allied documents [microform]: travels and explorations of the Jesuit missionaries in New France, 1610-1791

“Are you a Communist, Dora?”
― Sally Wentworth, Summer Fire

“My objections to Marx are of two sorts: one, that he was muddle-headed; and the other, that his thinking was almost entirely inspired by hatred.”
― Bertrand Russell

“We must draw up a plan for the formation of such a corps with several million people taking up the study of dialectical materialism and historical materialism, the theoretical basis of Marxism, and combating all shades of idealism and mechanical materialism. At present there are many cadres doing theoretical work, but there is still no corps of theoretical workers, much less a powerful one. Without such a corps, the cause of the entire Party, the socialist industrialization and socialist transformation of our country, the modernization of our national defence and our research in atomic energy cannot move along or succeed. I therefore recommend that you comrades read philosophy.”
― Mao Zedong, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung: Volume V

“[T]he heart is a very unreliable coinpass, and even will and knowledge, as all ideological factors in general, are not to be trusted as guides if they are without any material basis…. [I]t is not love nor help which is the guiding rule of our time, but hammer or anvil. In reality it is thus: who does not want to be a servant must try to become a master. Under such conditions it is idle to hope that people will sacrifice realities for ideal precepts. We are not sentimental enough to expect such things. Though we use moral arguments in our struggle against the bourgeois, we do all we can to stimulate our class consciousness.”
― Joseph Dietzgen

“While the new Legionnaire man eliminated his enemies in the name of God, with a cross in his hand, the new Communist man eliminated God altogether and stood on His pedestal. They were both equally thirsty for blood.”
― Teodor Flonta, A Luminous Future

“Stalin is dead! Stalin is dead! No school today!” we yelled. “Stalin is dead! No school today...” was a chant to linger in my ears for years to come.”
― Teodor Flonta, A Luminous Future

“All the light was now coming from the East; and it looked breathtakingly new. In a very short time, everything was nationalized, from banks to factories, from pharmacies to little distilleries.”
― Teodor Flonta, A Luminous Future

“The cane leaves a mark on your flesh for a few hours, a day or two. The good answers to the questions leave a mark on your brain for many years, sometimes even for life,” my father said.”
― Teodor Flonta, A Luminous Future

“My father also told me that he felt free in that little hole in the ground, much freer than he felt outside, where he was always being chased by the criminals of the regime. That freedom came from inside, from his thoughts, from his soul; and nobody could take that from him.”
― Teodor Flonta, A Luminous Future

“The class nature of the imperialists and reactionaries makes them antagonistic to the masses of the people. Accordingly they are afraid of the word "people" itself. Frequently using, the word "nation", they try to cover the class confrontation and conflict of capitalist society.”
― Kim Jong Il, Socialism is a Science

“The phrase "the masses of the people" assumes a class character in class society. An exploiter society is divided into the exploiter class and the exploited class, or the ruling class and the ruled class, depending on who owns the means of production and who controls state power. The exploited class, the ruled class, forms the majority of the masses of the people. The class structure of the masses of the people is not immutable. It changes as social history develops. In capitalist society, not only workers and peasants, but also working intellectuals and many other classes and strata which champion and struggle for independence, form the masses of the people. In socialist society, all people are transformed into socialist working people, so everyone is a member of the masses of the people.”
― Kim Jong Il, Socialism is a Science

“According to the religious, idealist view, which regards man as a purely spiritual being, man is a product of a certain supernatural, mysterious being and his destiny is also decided by the latter. By means of their religious, idealist view of man, the reactionary ruling class and its spokesmen preached that the miserable lot of the working masses who suffered exploitation and oppression was their unavoidable fate and therefore, they had to submit to their predestined lot.”
― Kim Jong Il, Socialism is a Science

“Society, based on private ownership and its product, individualism, inevitably splits into hostile classes, produces class antagonism and social inequality, and is accompanied by the exploitation and oppression of the popular masses by a small ruling class. History shows that independence for the masses cannot be realized in a society based on individualism. A historical review of the development of human society proves that, in order to realize the masses' independence, a society based on individualism must be replaced by a society based on collectivism, by socialism and communism.”
― Kim Jong Il, Socialism is a Science

“Of course, the capitalist class takes an interest in developing the productive forces in order to gain more profit, but capitalists do not create material wealth with their own hands. The masses create ideological and cultural wealth directly, and also produce progressive thinkers, prominent scientists and talented men of art and literature. The exploiter class also put forward their own ideological and cultural mouthpieces, but the ideas and culture they produce obstruct a moral social life and development. The masses transform society. The reactionary exploiter class is only interested in maintaining and consolidating the outmoded exploitative system, not in social transformation. The farce of "reform" staged by the ruling bourgeoisie is essentially aimed at extricating themselves from the crisis of capitalism.”
― Kim Jong Il, Socialism is a Science

“In capitalist society, where the future of the younger generations depends on their parents' purse, they cannot avoid falling victim to social inequality and social evils. Due to the aggression and intervention of the imperialists and the plunder of the exploiter class, many of the young generation throughout the world lose their lives or are maimed by war, social conflict, disease and hunger or they wander about the streets, committing crimes and degenerating.”
― Kim Jong Il, Socialism is a Science

“It is clear that if socialist ownership is dissolved and converted into private ownership, the means of production, having been privatized, will be concentrated, sooner or later, in the hands of privileged people, speculators and a handful of other exploiters, no matter what the method of privatization may be. It is not long since privatization was carried out in those countries in which socialism had collapsed, but millionaires have already appeared while the vast majority of the working people are suffering because of unemployment and poverty.”
― Kim Jong Il, Abuses of Socialism are Intolerable

“Man is a social being who works independently, creatively and consciously.”
― Kim Jong Il, Giving Priority to Ideological Work is Essential for Accomplishing Socialism

“While they were still transporting the grain, there was dust wherever you went. It was like clouds of smoke—over the village, over the fields, over the face of the moon at night. I remember one man going out of his mind. 'We're on fire!' he kept screaming. 'The sky is burning! The earth is burning!' No, it was not the sky—it was life itself that was burning.”
― Vasily Grossman, Forever Flowing

“Communisme’, c’est l’affirmation que ce qui est commun à tous les hommes doit être l’objet incessant de la pensée, de l’action, de l’organisation.”
― Alain Badiou