The people’s flag is deepest red;
It shrouded oft our martyred dead …
… Then raise the scarlet standard high!
Within its shade we’ll live or die.
Tho’ cowards flinch and traitors sneer,
We'll keep the red flag flying here. James M Connell, The Red Flag, 1889
I left Europe four decades ago because of Socialism has killed off the opportunities there. Arnold Schwarzenegger
The scare campaign wasn’t working. In fact the more they called Obama a socialist the more he went ahead in the polls. Michael Moore, Capitalism: A Love Story, 2009
The language of priorities is the religion of Socialism. Aneurin Bevan, 1897-1960
Socialist principles have been tossed aside with almost indecent cynicism and casualness. Racial discrimination in Britain has been condoned and strengthened. American butchery in Vietnam has been actively supported and encouraged. Social welfare and economic development in Britain have been sacrificed to carry out a reactionary economic programme at the behest of international finance capital. What of the Left leaders in Parliament? Tell them off on your fingers, comrades, and think of their words and deeds in recent months while the Labour movement has been sold down the river. It is a sad picture and I can personally neither see nor offer any excuses. Are we finished, we of the Labour Left? Malcolm Caldwell, letter to Tribune 20th August 1968
There is nothing socialist about the commanding heights now. For this Government is trying to create a power elite, more cohesive and omnipotent than any we have seen in recent British history ... this is the ultimate significance of the attempt to forge a consensus of opinion and action between the leaders of Government, industry and the unions. Alan Dawe, letter to Tribune on resigning from Labour Party
In a Lancashire cotton-town you could probably go for months on end without once hearing an ‘educated’ accent, whereas there can hardly be a town in the South of England where you could throw a brick without hitting the niece of a bishop. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
The typical Socialist is … a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting. ibid.
To the ordinary working man, the sort you would meet in any pub on Saturday night, Socialism does not mean much more than better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing you about. ibid.
The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W H Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling. ibid.
We of the sinking middle class … may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared for, after all, we have nothing to lose but our aitches. ibid.
And it is no use writing off the current distaste for Socialism as the product of stupidity or corrupt motives. If you want to remove that distaste you have got to understand it, which means getting inside the mind of the ordinary objector to Socialism. ibid.
The only thing for which we can combine is the underlying ideal of Socialism: justice and liberty. ibid.
First, as to the enemies themselves – I mean all those people who grasp that capitalism is evil but who are conscious of a sort of queasy, shuddering sensation when Socialism is mentioned. As I have pointed out, this is traceable to two main causes. One is the personal inferiority of many individual Socialists; the other is the fact the Socialism is too often coupled with a fat-bellied, godless conception of ‘progress’ which revolts anyone with a feeling for tradition or the rudiments of an aesthetic sense. ibid.
Even the single word ‘Comrade’ has done its dirty little bit towards discrediting the Socialist movement. ibid.
Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it. George Orwell, Why I Write
Total abstinence and a good filing system are not now the right signposts to the socialist Utopia; or at least, if they are, some of us will fall by the wayside. Anthony Crosland, 1918-77, British Labour politician
If one understands that socialism is not a share-the-wealth program, but is in reality a method to consolidate and control the wealth, then the seeming paradox of super-rich men promoting socialism becomes no paradox at all. Instead, it becomes logical, even the perfect tool of power-seeking megalomaniacs.
Communism, or more accurately socialism, is not a movement of the downtrodden masses, but of the economic elite. Gary Allen, author
Democracy is the road to Socialism. Karl Marx, disputed quotation
Thus the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new master, and whispering in his ears sinister prophecies of coming catastrophe.
In this way arose feudal Socialism; half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future, at times by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core, but always ludicrous in its effects, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history. Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples’ money. Margaret Thatcher
With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order. Noam Chomsky
The consistent anarchist ... should be a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat. Norm Chomsky
Anarchism can be conceived as a kind of voluntary socialism, that is, as libertarian socialist or anarcho-syndicalist or communist anarchist, in the tradition of, say, Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin and others. They had in mind a highly organized form of society, but a society that was organized on the basis of organic units, organic communities. And generally, they meant by that the workplace and the neighborhood, and from those two basic units there could derive through federal arrangements a highly integrated kind of social organization which might be national or even international in scope. And these decisions could be made over a substantial range, but by delegates who are always part of the organic community from which they come, to which they return, and in which, in fact, they live. Noam Chomsky
They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America? Fidel Castro
I should tie myself to no particular system of society other than of socialism. Nelson Mandela
The only way to save the world is through socialism, but a socialism that exists within a democracy; there’s no dictatorship here. Hugo Chavez
I am convinced that the path to a new, better and possible world is not capitalism, the path is socialism. Hugo Chavez
The left is back, and it’s the only path we have to get out of the spot to which the right has sunken us. Socialism builds and capitalism destroys. Hugo Chavez
We’re going to fight racism not with racism, but we’re going to fight with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism. Fred Hampton
It’s impossible, I think, however much I’d become disillusioned politically or evolve into a post-political person, I don’t think I’d ever change my view that socialism is the best political moment humans have ever come up with. Christopher Hitchens
The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level. Norman Mailer
Socialism is undoubtedly in the throes of a crisis greater than at any time since 1917. The last half of 1989 saw the dramatic collapse of most of the communist party governments of Eastern Europe. Joe Slovo
You may see the emergence of a new political party from the body of the trade union movement which represents a very clear-cut socialist alternative policy and which gives expression to the views of the trade union movement in parliament. Arthur Scargill
‘Socialist’ is the nastiest thing you can say about an American politician in some quarters. Jay McInerney
A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction