13 quotes
I still think the worst enemy of human hope is not brute facts, but men of brains who will not face them.
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955)
More goods and fewer people is the slogan I should like to see carried at the head of humanity's march into the future.
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955)
Stalinism, as we have seen, contains all of the evils of Nazism and Fascism, most of them in extremer form.
Stalin's Russia and the Crisis in Socialism (1940)
A liberal mind is a mind that is able to imagine itself believing anything.
Hegelism is like a mental disease—you cannot know what it is until you get it, and then you can't know because you've got it.
I omit from consideration here the fact that people who demand neutrality in any situation are usually not neutral, but in favor of the status quo.
Enjoyment of Poetry With Anthology for Enjoyment of Poetry (1951)
Stalinism is worse than fascism, more ruthless, barbarous, unjust, immoral, anti-democratic, unredeemed by any hope or scruple, ... better described as superfascist.
Stalin's Russia and the Crisis in Socialism (1940)
What happened here is the most significant, as it is the most devastating human thing that has happened in America since Sherman marched to the sea.
An honest, bold, loyal, and within its limits extremely highbrow attempt to produce through common ownership a society of the Free and Equal, produced a tyrant and a totalitarian state;…
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955)
Marxists profess to reject religion in favor of science, but they cherish a belief that the external universe is evolving with reliable, if not divine, necessity in exactly the direction in which they want to go.
Marxism: Is It Science? (1940)
It was natural that idealistic people who had ceased to believe in heaven should think up some bright hope for humanity on earth. That, I think, more than any objection to "capitalism", accounts for the spread of the socialist dream, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries.
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955)
The backers of Hitler in Germany made the same mistake about the Nazi party that the workers and soldiers in Petrograd made about the Bolshevik party. Each group believed that this new brutal, rabid, monolithic fighting gang, on achieving power, would promote, as had been promised, its enlightened interests.
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955)
An armed seizure of power by a highly organized minority party, whether in the name of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the Glory of Rome, the Supremacy of the Nordics, or any other slogan that may be invented, and no matter how ingeniously integrated with the masses of the population, will normally lead to the totalitarian state. 'Totalitarian state' is merely the modern name for tyranny.
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955)