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Communism Quotes

Karl Marx has the most entries, then Olavo de Carvalho, Yuval Noah Harari, Gustave de Molinari and Engels, so supporters and critics share the page. Bertrand Russell has the most sourced lines. In The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (1920) he says the hopes behind communism are as admirable as those of the Sermon on the Mount but are held as fanatically and are as likely to do as much harm. In Why I Am Not a Christian (1927) he lists it with Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity and Islam as untrue and harmful. In 1963 he says he dislikes it because it is undemocratic.

Three entries are marked misattributed. The line about being called a saint for feeding the hungry and a Communist for asking why they are hungry is credited to Dorothy Day, and the notes list several variants. Charles de Gaulle is credited with a remark that the evolution toward communism is inevitable, and Barry Goldwater with one about fraternities.

Random quote on Communism

Most quoted on communism:

The history of Communism, originally inspired by noble ideals, clearly illustrates what happens when people attempt to change external reality – create a new earth – without any prior change in their inner reality, their state of consciousness. They make plans without taking into account the blueprint for dysfunction that every human being carries within: the ego.

Eckhart Tolle A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose (2005)

All religions so far have been the expression of historical stages of development of individual peoples or groups of peoples. But communism is the stage of historical development which makes all existing religions superfluous and brings about their disappearance.

Friedrich Engels Principles of Communism (1847)

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

Karl Marx The German Ideology (1845)

Some tell me "Preach the pure gospel!" This reminds me that the Communist secret police also told me to preach Christ, but not to mention communism. Is it really so, that those who are for what is called "a pure gospel" are inspired by the same spirit as those of the Communist secret police?

Richard Wurmbrand Tortured For Christ (1967)

The most important Marxist philosophers: Lukács, Korsch, Gramsci, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Lefebvre, Althusser.

Olavo de Carvalho

The details supplied by Khrushchev on Stalin’s methods ... lead us to believe in the existence in these countries of a veritable state capitalism, exploiting the working class in a manner not very different from the way the working class is used in capitalist countries.

Aimé Césaire

Across the world academics still clung to the words and ideas of Marx and Engels and even Lenin. Fools. There were even those who said that Communism had been tried in the wrong country; that Russia had been too far backward to make those wonderful ideas work.

Tom Clancy

The abolition of private property is, doubtless, the shortest and most significant way to characterize the revolution in the whole social order which has been made necessary by the development of industry – and for this reason it is rightly advanced by communists as their main demand.

Friedrich Engels Principles of Communism (1847)

The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians. They really do not believe in it and hence are hypocrites. All of them pant for money and hope to collar it by changing the rules. This fundamental false pretense colors their whole propaganda. They have no more sense of honor than so many congressmen and engage constantly in wholesale lying.

H. L. Mencken

The perversion of Stalinist Communism consists in the fact that the view by means of which the Party looks at history coincides immediately with history's gaze upon itself. To use good old Stalinist jargon, today already half-forgotten, Communists act immediately in the name of "objective laws of historical progress"; it is history itself, its necessity, that speaks through their mouths.

Slavoj Žižek

"That's Mao."
"Do people still respect him?"
"The government pays lip service to his memory, but the hero worship of past eras is over."
"And what about the ordinary people?"
"The so-called proletariat?"
"Yup."
"They've found another god to follow."
"Xi Jinping?"
"Money."

Shamini Flint

Since the communists cannot enter upon the decisive struggle between themselves and the bourgeoisie until the bourgeoisie is in power, it follows that it is in the interest of the communists to help the bourgeoisie to power as soon as possible in order the sooner to be able to overthrow it.

Friedrich Engels Principles of Communism (1847)

The overthrow of communism gave a green light to the unbridled exploitative impulses of Western corporate interests. No longer needing to convince workers that they live better than their counterparts in Russia, and no longer constrained by a competing system, the corporate class is rolling back the many gains that working people in the West have won over the years. Now that the free market, in its meanest form, is emerging triumphant in the East, so will it prevail in the West.

Michael Parenti Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (1997)

To tell the truth, to arrive together at the truth, is a communist and revolutionary act.

Antonio Gramsci

It's beyond me how anybody can look at these protestors and call them anything other than what they are: anti-American, anticapitalist, pro-Marxist communists.

Rush Limbaugh

In my experience Communism is intellectual alcohol – nasty and harmful if taken neat, but an essential ingredient of every stimulating drink.

A. J. P. Taylor

Now, if one speaks of the limitations of capitalism, there is always someone who will label you a communist or draw antagonistic conclusions.

Andrea Orlando

I'm getting sick and tired of people saying that this movement has been infiltrated by Communists. There are as many Communists in this freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Communism is the opiate of the intellectuals [with] no cure except as a guillotine might be called a cure for dandruff.

Clare Boothe Luce

When people are standing up for our present rotten system, they are being worse than Communists, it seems to me.

Dorothy Day The Duty of Delight (2011)

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