Socialism
1989 Czech joke - We know you can turn an aquarium into fish soup, but can you turn fish soup back into an aquarium?
Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson - The most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize-winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012.
Raymond Aron - On ne peut pas être à la fois communiste, intelligent et honnête. English: One cannot be at the same time communist, intelligent, and honest. (Aron's trilemma)
Sir Winston Churchill (House of Commons, 22 October 1945) - The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
Sir Winston Churchill (Perth, 28 May 1948) - Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy.
Theodore Dalrymple - Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.
Theodore Dalrymple (in Our Culture, What’s Left of It, 2005) - When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude.
Deng Xiaoping (1960) - It doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice. (French version: Peu importe qu'un chat soit blanc ou noir, s'il attrape la souris, c'est un bon chat.)
Deng Xiaoping - When you open the window, both fresh air and flies come in.
Albert Einstein (in Why Socialism?, 1949) - The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil [of human suffering]… I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate… [this evil], namely through the establishment of a socialist economy.
Ernst Gellner - What brought Bolshevism down in the end was perhaps not its lack of the sacred but, on the contrary, its lack of the profane. (...) When the sacrament turns out to be as squalid as indeed it was under Brezhnev, faith must go, and faith did go. It had sur vived (indeed flourished) under the massive and random bloodletting under Stalin, but it could not survive this.
Jacques Godfrain - Les socialistes aiment tellement les pauvres qu'ils en fabriquent. English: Socialists are so found of the poor that they make new ones.
Daniel Greenfield about Occupy Wall Street, 2011 - A bunch of smelly hippies (...) decided to squat a park in order to make a statement about their own need for attention.
Joseph Heath - Much of what Marx disliked about capitalism was simply the disorder of an unplanned economy.
Eric Hoffer - The Soviet Union has neither soviets nor unions.
Eric Hoffer - People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.
Erich Honecker (on 19 January 1989) - Die Mauer wird in 50 und auch in 100 Jahren noch bestehen bleiben. The wall will still be standing in fifty and even a hundred years from now.
Hungarian joke - Socialism is the longest and most painful road from capitalism to capitalism.
Steven Johnson - State-run economies were fundamentally hierarchies, not networks.
Nikita Khrushchev (November 18, 1956) - My vas pokhoronim = We will bury you.
Lenin (Letter to Gorky, 1919) - The educated classes (...) who consider themselves the brains of the nation, in fact are not its brains but its shit. French: L'intelligentsia… s'imagine être le cerveau de la nation. En réalité, elle n'en est pas le cerveau, elle en est la merde.
Pierre Ryckmans, a.k.a. Simon Leys, on European maoists - Les idiots disent des idioties, comme les pommiers produisent des pommes.
Mark Lilla - Nor are reactionaries to be found only on the right. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and of revolutionary hopes for the post-colonial world, the European left has traded the rhetoric of hope for that of nostalgia.
H.L. Mencken (in Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebooks, 1956) - The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses.
Adam Michnik - Back in 1990, I wrote that nationalism is the last stage of communism: a system of thought that gives simple but wrong answers to complex questions. Nationalism is practically the natural ideology of authoritarian regimes.
François Mitterrand (Discours à Epinay, 1971) - L'argent qui corrompt, l'argent qui achète, l'argent qui écrase, l'argent qui tue, l'argent qui ruine, et l'argent qui pourrit jusqu'à la conscience des hommes !
Gary Saul Morson (2019) - People sometimes ask the reason for slavery, but since slavery was practiced everywhere for most of human history, the right question is the opposite one: why was slavery eventually abolished in many places? In the Bolshevik context, it is mercy and compassion that require explanation.
George Orwell - The underlying motive of many Socialists … is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. The present state of affairs offends them not because it causes misery, still less because it makes freedom impossible, but because it is untidy; what they desire, basically, is to reduce the world to something resembling a chessboard.
George Orwell (Politics and the English Language, 1946) - In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.
Karl Bernhardovitch Radek, (1885 - 1939, né Karol Sobelsohn, bolchevique et dirigeant du Komintern) - L'humanité est passée par trois stades - le matriarcat, le patriarcat et le secrétariat. (Untranslatable).
Ronald Reagan (1964) - The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.
Joan Robinson on Korea in 1977 - Obviously, sooner or later the country must be reunited by absorbing the South into socialism.
Paul Samuelson (Economics, 13th Ed. , 1989, p. 837) - Contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, the Soviet economy is proof that... a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.
Karthik Sankaran - What is Communism? The longest and most painful transition from feudalism to capitalism.
Jean Sévillia - Les Socialistes sont athées mais croient à l'enfer pour y jeter leurs adversaires. English: Socialists are atheists, but they do believe in hell, so as to be able to cast their opponents to it.
Helmut Schoeck (in Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior, 1966) - Marxist (...) doctrines have remained blind and naïve when faced with the solution of the problem of envy in any future society. It is hard to see how the totally secularized and ultimately egalitarian society promised us by socialism can ever solve the problem of the residual envy latent in society.
Robert Solow (2010 01 12) - My late colleague Evsey Domar, who was, among other things, a student of the Soviet economy, told us how the planning bureau began by setting production quotas for paper factories in tons per year. The result was paper so thick that it could not fit in a Soviet typewriter or anywhere else. So the clever planning bureau changed to setting quotas in terms of square meters per year. The result was paper so thin that even a member of the planning bureau could see right through it. The lesson is that it is so much simpler and more effective to tell paper producers that they have to compete to sell their paper to notebook manufacturers (who are also competing with each other), and live off the proceeds.
Soviet-era joke - We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.
Soviet-era joke - "No, my friend, we will not live long enough to see communism, but our children... our poor children!"
Soviet-era joke - A capitalist fairy tale begins, "Once upon a time, there was...". A Marxist fairy tale begins, "Some day, there will be..."
Soviet-era joke - A Western dog, a Polish dog and a Soviet dog sit together. The Westen dog says 'Where I live, if you bark long enough, you will be heard and given some meat', the Polish dog replies 'What is "meat"?' and the Soviet dog says 'What is "bark"?'.
Soviet-era joke - Under socialism, life is average: worse than yesterday and better than tomorrow.
Soviet-era joke - A Muscovite goes to buy sausages from the butcher, waits in line in vain, and in despair curses the Marxist-Leninist system. A policeman hears his oath and cautions him ‘Comrade, a few years ago you would have been shot for saying that.’ Back at home the man confides to his wife that he now knows the depth of the economic crisis. ‘No sausages in the shops?’ She asks. ‘Worse than that,’ he replies, ‘no bullets for the police.’
Thomas Sowell - The history of the 20th century is full of examples of countries that set out to redistribute wealth and ended up redistributing poverty.
Thomas Sowell - There was a knowledge problem that was inherent in that [Soviet] system. In a nutshell, those with the power didn’t have the knowledge, and those with the knowledge didn’t have the power.
Thomas Sowell - That people on the political left have a certain set of opinions, just as people do in other parts of the ideological spectrum, is not surprising. What is surprising, however, is how often the opinions of those on the left are accompanied by hostility and even hatred.
Thomas Sowell - I have never understood why it is greed to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.
Thomas Sowell - It is (...) central to totalitarian ideology that it convert questions of fact into questions of motive. Facts are a threat because they are independent of the ideology, and questioning the motives of whoever reports discordant facts is a low-cost way of disposing of them.
Attributed to John Steinbeck - Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
Margaret Thatcher (Thames TV This Week, 5/2/1976) - Socialist governments (...) always run out of other people's money.
Traditional Russian tale (according to Rolf Dobelli) - A farmer finds a magic lamp. He rubs it, and out of thin air a genie appears who promises to grant him one wish. The farmer thinks about this for a little while. Finally, he says: “My neighbor has a cow and I have none. I hope that his drops dead.”
Eugene Vodolazkin (2016) - Between the Middle Ages and modernity in Britain is a great distance. But in Russia it's not so far away.
Voltaire (Lettre à Frédéric II de Prusse, janvier 1737) - Ceux qui crient contre ce qu'on appelle le luxe ne sont guère que des pauvres de mauvaise humeur. English: Those who recriminate against luxury are just ill-tempered paupers.
Edward O. Wilson (October 1994 interview in the Los Angeles Times) - Good ideology. Wrong species.
Yao Puzhong - In Communism, the future is certain; it is only the past that might not be.
