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Socialists take over from bourgeois capitalist society its materialism, its atheism, its cheap prophets, its hostility against the spirit and all spiritual life, its restless striving for success and amusement, its personal selfishness, its incapacity for interior recollection.

— Nikolai Berdyaev The End of Our Time (1919)

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More quotes by Nikolai Berdyaev

The new religious consciousness rises up against the nihilistic attitude towards the world and mankind.

For the new religious consciousness the declaration of the will of God is together with this a declaration of the rights of man, a revealing of the Divine within mankind.

We live in a nightmare of falsehoods, and there are few who are sufficiently awake and aware to see things as they are. Our first duty is to clear away illusions and recover a sense of reality.

Political Testament (1949)

There is absolute truth in anarchism and it is to be seen in its attitude to the sovereignty of the state and to every form of state absolutism.

Slavery and Freedom (1939)

No one today likes truth: utility and self interest have long ago been substituted for truth.

Political Testament (1949)

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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

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