Top 34 Capitalism Versus Socialism Quotes
#1. After the collapse of socialism, capitalism remained without a rival. This unusual situation unleashed its greedy and - above all - its suicidal power. The belief is now that everything - and everyone - is fair game.
Gunter Grass
#2. Capitalism is at least tolerable, which cannot be said of Socialism or Communism.
Benjamin Tucker
#3. Now a great debate has been born. The thesis is Democratic Socialism. The antithesis is free-market capitalism. The Obama Democrats have posed the challenge. It is now up to the Republicans to pick it up and fight along these lines.
Dick Morris
#4. The bourgeois during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.
Karl Marx
#5. The broad liberal objective is a balanced and flexible "mixed economy," thus seeking to occupy that middle ground between capitalism and socialism whose viability has so long been denied by both capitalists and socialists.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#6. In socialism, private property is anathema, and equal distribution of income the first consideration. In capitalism, private property is cardinal, and distribution left to ensue from the play of free contract and selfish interest on that basis, no matter what anomalies it may present.
George Bernard Shaw
#7. They do say that socialism is the ideal philosophy-just as long as you have capitalists to pay for it.
Wilbur Smith
#8. The market came with the dawn of civilization and it is not an invention of capitalism ... If it leads to improving the well-being of the people there is no contradiction with socialism.
Mikhail Gorbachev
#9. Marx made theory ... Lenin applied it with his sense of large-scale social organization ... And Henry Ford made the work of the socialist state possible.
Diego Rivera
#10. Capitalists desire purchasing power. Socialists lust for the power to plan society. Which is worse?
A.E. Samaan
#11. Implicit in the stare of those eyes, the power of those knobbly hands, was labor's historic threat of violence against capital.
Edmund Morris
#13. Interestingly, Marxism, Communism and its derivative, Socialism, when seen years later in practice, are nothing but state-capitalism and rule by a privileged minority, exercising despotic and total control over a majority which is left with virtually no property or legal rights.
Andrew Carrington Hitchcock
#14. Socialism and capitalism are both essentially materialist, just different ways of approaching the lifeless world of matter and deciding how to share the spoils.
Iain McGilchrist
#15. The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the
inherent vice of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
Winston S. Churchill
#16. If socialism gave more prosperity than capitalism does, I would still prefer capitalism - as it gives more freedom. Luckily, though, I do not have to face this dillema ...
Janusz Korwin-Mikke
#17. The problems of financing the universities and their intellectual freedom, threatened by political and bureaucratic interference, are problems which are invariant under the ism transformations: socialism, communism, capitalism, or any other ism or ology.
Serge Lang
#18. Capitalism works better than it sounds, while socialism sounds better than it works.
Richard M. Nixon
#19. Socialism and Communism have failed, but now Capitalism is failing us.
Jo M. Sekimonyo
#20. Human society cannot basically stop the destruction of the environment under capitalism. Socialism is the only structure that makes it possible.
Gus Hall
#21. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.
Ludwig Von Mises
#22. Income inequality has no necessary connection with poverty, the lack of material resources for a decent life, such as adequate food, shelter, and clothing. A society with great income inequality may have no poor people, and a society with no income inequality may have nothing but poor people.
Robert Higgs
#23. ...the government in Beijing continues to define itself as Marxist-Leninist, though 'Market-Leninist' would be rather more apt.
Francis Wheen
#24. It's not capitalism that's failing the U.S. but socialism.
James Cook
#25. 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.
Sidney Hook
#26. What is the most effective, practical way of raising the wealth of nations? What causes wealth? I have come to think that the dream of democratic socialism is inferior to the dream of democratic capitalism, and that the latter's superiority in actual practice is undeniable.
Michael Novak
#27. Capitalist production ... was necessary to develop the productive forces of society to a level which will make possible an equal development worthy of human beings for all members of society. All earlier forms of society were too poor for this.
Friedrich Engels
#28. Less than seventy-five years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won.
Robert Heilbroner
#29. If socialism failed, it was for political, more than economic, reasons; and if capitalism is to succeed it will be because it finds the political will and means to tame its economic forces.
Robert L. Heilbroner
#30. There are a few people, but a diminishing number, who still believe that Marxism, as an economic system, off era a coherent alternative to capitalism, and socialism has, indeed, triumphed in one country.
Herbert Read
#31. By the way, if socialism is so damn hot, why doesn't the pope ask all Mexicans to return home? If capitalism is such a bad thing, why doesn't the pope say to every Cuban living in America, "Get the hell back to Cuba"?
Rush Limbaugh
#32. I was born in 1948, so I'm a '60s kid, and in the '60s everyone talked all the time, endlessly, about socialism versus capitalism, about political choices, ideology, Marxism, revolution, 'the system' and so on.
Tony Judt
#33. The issue is Socialism versus Capitalism. I am for Socialism because I am for humanity. We have been cursed with the reign of gold long enough. Money constitutes no proper basis of civilization. The time has come to regenerate society - we are on the eve of universal change.
Eugene V. Debs
#34. The enemy of liberal capitalism today is not so much socialism as nihilism.
Irving Kristol
