Collectivism Quotes

Which is worse? Lust for the purchasing power of money, or the kind of lust that covets power over others? Let the history of 20th Century socialist revolutions answer that question.

It’s been easier to convince people to hand over half their income, their children to war, and their freedoms in perpetuity, than to engage them in seriously considering how roads might function in the absence of taxation.

Recall that the minimum wage was initially conceived as a method to exclude undesirables from the workforce.

Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at.

The essence of diversity is the individual's experience of it. Diversity is about personalised shades of experience emanating from universal colours of humanity, but each person takes from the universal what is relevant to them and alters it by their own interpersonal experience.

I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.

When someone steals another's clothes, we call them a thief. Should we not give the same name to one who could clothe the naked and does not? The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes; the money which you hoard up belongs to the poor.

We know how the people of Argentina ruined their country. We know how the people of Venezuela ruined their country. Few Americans know much about the history of Argentina or Venezuela. But if they wish to know how the people of the USA are ruining their own country, all they have to do is look around themselves, including, in most cases, looking in the mirror.

The truth is, one who seeks to achieve freedom by petitioning those in power to give it to him has already failed, regardless of the response. To beg for the blessing of “authority” is to accept that the choice is the master’s alone to make, which means that the person is already, by definition, a slave.

In the natural sciences, some checks exist on the prolonged acceptance of nutty ideas, which do not hold up well under experimental and observational tests and cannot readily be shown to give rise to useful working technologies. But in economics and the other social studies, nutty ideas may hang around for centuries. Today, leading presidential candidates and tens of millions of voters in the USA embrace ideas that might have been drawn from a 17th-century book on the theory and practice of mercantilism, and multitudes of politicians and ordinary people espouse notions that Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and others exploded more than two centuries ago. In these realms, nearly everyone simply believes whatever he feels good about believing.

A world of fully developed individuals is immune to the cult of collectivism.

Of all the simplifications to which the human spirit naturally inclines, unable to reconcile itself to the complexity of the real, there is none more dangerous than the attempt to integrate the whole of society in one vast, permanent action group.

Sadly enough, individual liberty remains the ideal of revolutionary thinkers even in the 21st Century.

These ideas fit the experience of these Japanese women who often talked about searching for or trying to develop "self" (jibun). Cultivating or polishing self by doing tea ceremony or being a good mother, for example, had a good connotation for the Japanese because it meant that you were trying to go beyond your narrow self and connect self with the larger world beyond social norms. But developing self in the new way these women used it meant to develop self according to just what you want to do or in a way that enhances your own possibilities in the world. Would others see choosing a life for self as selfish? These women had to maintain some ambiguity because they were wandering into dangerous territory when they wanted to travel just to enjoy themselves, or keep working and not marry. In a society that honored the cultivation of a larger self, would they themselves someday suffer for having chosen the self-centered way?

When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we in essence accept that the state owns our bodies.

Irony: Taking a 170-year-old envy-based "philosophy," which has led to the murder of several hundred million human beings and the oppression of billions more, and calling it "progressive".

Communism is what happens when Socialists realize that they want complete control over every aspect of human life.

In spite of its alluring name, the welfare state stands or falls by compulsion. It is compulsion imposed upon us with the state’s power to punish noncompliance. Once this is clear, it is equally clear that the welfare state is an evil the same as every restriction of freedom.

No one has the right to place one human being in a position of political power over another.

My take on socialism is this: Socialism only seems to work when you don't fully implement it, when you keep enough capitalism around to pay socialism's bills, at least for a time. It's the difference between milking the cow and killing it. Socialism has no theory of wealth creation; it's just a destructive, envy-driven fantasy about redistributing it after something else (and somebody else) creates it first.

Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.

State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.

Big Government' is a lot less like a 'Big Brother', and a lot more like a mother-in-law.

What ranks above all else for economic and political reconstruction is a radical change of ideologies. Economic prosperity is not so much a material problem; it is, first of all, an intellectual, spiritual, and moral problem.

If any man's money can be taken by a so-called government, without his own personal consent, all his other rights are taken with it; for with his money the government can, and will, hire soldiers to stand over him, compel him to submit to its arbitrary will, and kill him if he resists.

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

Every totalitarian Communist considered themselves as a Socialist first and foremost.