Top 100 Quotes About Socialism And Capitalism
#1. 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
#2. The real division in the world today is not between socialism and capitalism, it's between freedom and totalitarianism.
Frank Underhill
#3. While I have questions about the language used in describing the two economic systems, I think people have fairly good gut sense of the difference between socialism and capitalism.
Chris Matthews
#4. 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
#5. If we take the pope at his word and socialism is highly preferable to capitalism and he was really concerned about these people, he would demand they go home. He would demand they return to their homelands wherever they are, if they were socialist.
Rush Limbaugh
#6. Capitalism is at least tolerable, which cannot be said of Socialism or Communism.
Benjamin Tucker
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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.
#10. 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
#11. They do say that socialism is the ideal philosophy-just as long as you have capitalists to pay for it.
Wilbur Smith
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Capitalists desire purchasing power. Socialists lust for the power to plan society. Which is worse?
A.E. Samaan
#15. Implicit in the stare of those eyes, the power of those knobbly hands, was labor's historic threat of violence against capital.
Edmund Morris
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. Capitalism works better than it sounds, while socialism sounds better than it works.
Richard M. Nixon
#22. Socialism and Communism have failed, but now Capitalism is failing us.
Jo M. Sekimonyo
#23. Human society cannot basically stop the destruction of the environment under capitalism. Socialism is the only structure that makes it possible.
Gus Hall
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. ...the government in Beijing continues to define itself as Marxist-Leninist, though 'Market-Leninist' would be rather more apt.
Francis Wheen
#27. It's not capitalism that's failing the U.S. but socialism.
James Cook
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Less than seventy-five years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won.
Robert Heilbroner
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. Capitalism is the sorcerer's apprentice: it has summoned up powers which have spun wildly out of control and now threaten to destroy us.The task of socialism is not to spur on those powers but to bring them under rational human control.
Terry Eagleton
#36. It's socialism that makes it bearable for us to live under capitalism.
Arnaldur Indridason
#37. What we do today has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism. It is a crony type of system that transfers money to the coffers of bureaucrats.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#38. The word "Capitalism" expresses, for our age, the sum of all evil. Even the opponents of Socialism are dominated by socialist ideas.
Ludwig Von Mises
#39. Capitalism is the way of the devil and exploitation. If you really want to look at things through the eyes of Jesus Christ
who I think was the first socialist
only socialism can really create a genuine society.
Hugo Chavez
#40. For now, we live in the mall, but I think it's closing soon.
Grafton Tanner
#41. To put it bluntly, there isn't one economic theory that can single-handedly explain Singapore's success; its economy combines extreme features of capitalism and socialism. All theories are partial; reality is complex.
Ha-Joon Chang
#42. Were the ironies of taxation any better: raising money for schools and hospitals and roads and bridges, and spending it on blowing up schools and hospitals and roads and bridges in self-defeating wars?
Edward St. Aubyn
#43. If Mr. Kennedy does not like Socialism, we do not like imperialism. We do not like Capitalism.
Fidel Castro
#44. The crime of capitalism is that it forces the vast majority of the population to remain preoccupied with basic concerns of nutrition, housing, health, and skill acquisition. It leaves little time for fostering the community and creativity that humans crave
Nivedita Majumdar
#45. It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for human cattle.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#46. We all know how 'modern democracies take loaves from the wealthy.' It's the slipups in the 'pass them out to the poor' department that inspire a study of Economics.
P. J. O'Rourke
#47. We are paying a heavy political price for 20 years in which, as a party, we have played down our criticism of capitalism and soft-peddled our advocacy of socialism
Tony Benn
#48. We all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#49. What if capitalism is unsustainable, and socialism is impossible?
Ken MacLeod
#50. We must reduce all the emissions that are destroying the planet. However, that requires a change in lifestyle, a change in the economic model: We must go from capitalism to socialism.
Hugo Chavez
#51. For the West, the enemy was not "socialism" but capitalism. How to tame and subdue the polar bear, how to take over the talent, the science, the technology, how to buy out the human capital, how to acquire the intellectual property rights?
Michel Chossudovsky
#52. The war cured me of all the "isms", he said. 'Nazism, communism, socialism, patriotism, nationalism, capitalism. I have seen them all. The problem is human nature. People. Shit always floats to the top.
Magda Szubanski
#53. When you say 'state' you mean 'national.' National Socialism. That is what Mussolini and Hitler did. National Socialism. State Capitalism. They've changed the name.
Beck
#54. Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Yes? Well socialism is exactly the reverse.
Len Deighton
#55. I don't think that the contradictions between capitalism and socialism can be resolved by war. This is no longer the age of the bow and arrow. It's the nuclear age, and war can annihilate us all. The only way to achieve solutions seems to be for the different social systems to coexist.
Fidel Castro
#56. We modern Marxists regard socialism as a historically brief transitional stage between feudalism and capitalism, necessary only in backward countries.
John McCarthy
#57. Under capitalism, man oppresses man. But under socialism, it's the other way around.
Russ Roberts
#58. American Progressives have declared war on the sanctity and autonomy of the individual.
A.E. Samaan
#59. We're going to fight racism not with racism, but we're going to fight with solidarity. We say we're not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we're going to fight it with socialism.
Fred Hampton
#60. Interventionism cannot be considered as an economic system destined to stay. It is a method for the transformation of capitalism into socialism by a series of successive steps.
Ludwig Von Mises
#61. Making universal prosperity a right is the surest way to universal poverty.
J.S.B. Morse
#62. In capitalism, man exploits man. In socialism, it's exactly the opposite.
Ben Tucker
#63. Capitalism will always survive, because socialism will be there to save it.
Ralph Nader
#64. The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality. East is West and West is East, and soon the twain will meet.
Will Durant
#65. Socialism failed because it couldn't tell the economic truth. Capitalism may fail because it couldn't tell the ecological truth.
Lester R. Brown
#66. A lot of family members worked in the joint commodities family business. It was a classic case of capitalism at work and socialism at home.
Uday Kotak
#67. The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution.
Ludwig Von Mises
#68. Anyone who objects to any government whatsoever as a form of socialism ought not to pull that socialist lever in their home, the one that makes their waste disappear in a whirlpool into the socialized sewage treatment plant.
John Medaille
#69. After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.
Terry Eagleton
#70. There is simply no other choice than this: either to abstain from interference in the free play of the market, or to delegate the entire management of production and distribution to the government. Either capitalism or socialism: there exists no middle way.
Ludwig Von Mises
#71. The 21st century will not be about the battle between capitalism and socialism but between the forces of progress and the forces of conservatism.
Tony Blair
#72. I think you hear, at least as an undertone, and it's going to grow louder, is that we believe that capitalism is the mantra of the day and anything that creeps towards socialism is a problem.
Tim Scott
#73. The problem with K-12 education is socialism and the solution is capitalism.
Peter Brimelow
#74. There is no freedom without groceries. There are no groceries without freedom. What people call 'capitalism' and 'socialism' are actually one and inseparable. It's a virtuous circle.
Rick Perlstein
#75. Socialism, or communism as it is sometimes called, is merely a secular religion, where the State becomes a god.
Stefan Molyneux
#76. Socialism is nothing but the capitalism of the lower classes.
Oswald Spengler
#77. In our discussions here at the forum there was no trace of the futile debate about what is better, capitalism or socialism ... We should seek a synthesis of ideas and values that have proven their viability ...
Mikhail Gorbachev
#78. Democracy is not compatible with capitalism but is congruent with a version of democratic socialism in which the wealth, resources, and benefits of a social order are shared in an equitable and just manner.
Henry Giroux
#79. Class analysis can thus function not simply as part of scientific theory of interests and conflicts, but of an emancipatory theory of alternatives and social justice as well. Even if socialism is off the historical agenda, the idea of countering the exploitative logic of capitalism is not.
Erik Olin Wright
#80. Socialism is not panacea and capitalism is not entirely evil.
Girdhar Joshi
#81. Capitalism works. In the end, socialism imploded on itself. Communism imploded on itself. Ultimately jihadism will implode on itself, if we stay in the fight and stay on offense because failed philosophies don't work, there's no future.
Roger Ailes
#82. Once socialism replaces capitalism, reason will determine the policies of states.
Kenneth Waltz
#83. If you bail out every investment bank that gets in trouble, that's not capitalism, that's socialism for the rich
Jim Rogers
#84. Capitalism has run its course, and we shall have to look for other ideals than the ones that capitalism has encouraged.
Edmund Wilson
#85. From a systematic standpoint, I think that capitalism is the best system. I can spend a lot of time explaining why I like communism, but it is actually not a good solution. Nor is socialism. So, capitalism is the right model.
Ben Horowitz
#86. It is not what you can do for your country, but what you can do for all of mankind.
Mike Norton
#87. Instead of poor America on socialism becoming more like rich America on capitalism, rich America on capitalism is becoming like poor America on socialism.
Star Parker
#88. From the viewpoint of economic democracy, the capitalism-socialism debate was a debate between private and state capitalism (i.e., the private or public employment system), and the debate was as misframed as would be a debate between the private or public ownership of slaves.
David P. Ellerman
#89. Government is a gang, but not merely as meritorious as a private gang because it claims legal legitimacy. It pillages and uses violence but under the cover of law, and seeks legitimacy not through competition but through the myth of the social contract.
Jeffrey Tucker
#90. [C]apitalism without financial failure is not capitalism at all, but a kind of socialism for the rich.
James Grant
#91. Christianity wasn't a system like capitalism or socialism, but a personal relationship with God.
Russell M. Stendal
#92. The myth of socialism is far stronger than the reality of capitalism. That is because capitalism is not really an ism at all. It is what people do if you leave them alone.
Arnold Beichman
#93. Capitalism may be the unequal distribution of wealth, socialism is the equal distribution of poverty.
Brian K. Vaughan
#94. As much as I say that market economy is a more aggressive, expansile form of command economy, I say now that democracy is a more aggressive, expansile form of dictatorship. The sin of democracy and any types of -cracy is their numbers.
Andreas Laurencius
#95. The times are too difficult and the crisis too severe to indulge in schadenfreude. Looking at it in perspective, the fact that there would be a financial crisis was perfectly predictable: its general nature, if not its magnitude. Markets are always inefficient.
Noam Chomsky
#96. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people "I offer you a good time," Hitler has said to them,
Anonymous
#97. During the New Deal, people thought to be liberal was to reject socialism on one extreme and fascism on the other, and to preserve capitalism through regulation and a social safety net.
Noah Feldman
#98. I think if we don't overthrow capitalism, we don't have a chance of saving the world ecologically. I think it is possible to have an ecologically sound society under socialism. I don't think it is possible under capitalism.
Judi Bari
#99. Corrupt, stupid grasping functionaries will make at least as big a muddle of socialism as stupid, selfish and acquisitive employers can make of capitalism.
Walter Lippmann
#100. In America, we don't, in daily discourse, use the words 'capitalism' or 'socialism.' They've been kind of nonexistent words, I would say, amongst the general public.
Michael Moore
