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Socialism and rationalism are to this day the touchstones of humanity, the rocks which lie in the course of revolution and science.

— Alexander Herzen My Past and Thoughts (1852)

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More quotes by Alexander Herzen

The peasants will be emancipated if there is a future for Rus and for the Slavic world.

I have a sincere pity for any nation where old heads grow on young shoulders; youth is a matter, not only of years, but of temperament.

My Past and Thoughts (1852)

An empire that cannot distance itself from such a gruesome sin that so deeply affects its internal structure does not have the right to education, to future development and participation in history.

Without equality there can be no real marriage. The wife who is excluded from all the interests that occupy her husband, who is alien to them and does not share them, may be a concubine, a housekeeper, a nurse, but not a wife in the full, honourable sense of the word.

My Past and Thoughts (1852)

A religion of life had come to replace a religion of penance and emaciation, of fasting and prayer. The crucified body had risen in its turn and was no longer abashed Man had reached a harmonious unity: he had discovered that he is a single being not made, like a pendulum, of two different metals,= that check each other; he realised that the foe in his members had ceased to exist.

My Past and Thoughts (1852)

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Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life.

Mikhail Gorbachev

Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God's children.

Martin Luther King Jr.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

Winston Churchill

In my opinion, nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated.

George Orwell

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Alexander Herzen (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.