The rulers of your minds indulge in proverbs, but they’ve forgotten the main one, that love cannot be forced, and they have a deeply rooted habit of liberating people and making them happy, especially those who haven’t asked for it. You probably fancy that there’s no better place in the world for me than your...

State ownership! It leads only to absurd and monstrous conclusions; state ownership means state monopoly, concentrated in the hands of one party and its adherents, and that state brings only ruin and bankruptcy to all.

Life is about means not ends. There is no utopia to be gained, there is no end-state that is static and eternal, once accomplished. This was one of the great lies of communism. Likewise, capitalism offers the great deception that thanks to its machinations everyone will be richer in the future, thus justifying gross inequality...

Socialism always produces evil results, no matter one’s intentions.

They who employ force by proxy are as much responsible for that force as though they employed it themselves.

The only way we’ll get freedom for ourselves is to identify ourselves with every oppressed people in the world. We are blood brothers to the people of Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba — yes Cuba too.

There is only a certain amount of wealth in the world, this thinking goes. Economics is a matter of acquiring and allocating, not creating. This was the view of the world’s smartest people, all top philosophers and not stupid people, for many thousands of years before the age of the enlightenment. It still is.

Mientras contemplaba al presidente tendido en el sarcófago de cristal, recordé la sensación de cataclismo que había tenido dos años antes al oír la noticia de su fallecimiento; el desengaño al descubrir que en el mundo no había dioses. Ni en sueños habríamos creído que el presidente Mao moriría un día, pero murió. Creíamos que...

I remembered Papa talking about Stalin confiscating peasants’ land, tools, and animals. He told them what crops they would produce and how much they would be paid. I thought it was ridiculous. How could Stalin simply take something that didn’t belong to him, something that a farmer and his family had worked their whole lives...

Anthony Howard, then editor of the left-wing New Statesman, once pointed out that if Huey Long had only used left-wing phraseology he would have enjoyed wide support from the New York and London intelligentsia.

Allra mest tyckte jag om att få var svinaktig med Hitler og Stalin.

For the movement was without scruples; she rolled towards her goal unconcernedly and deposed the corpses of the drowned in the windings of her course. Her course had many twists and windings; such was the law of her being. And whosoever could not follow her crooked course was washed on to the bank, for such...

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.

We ate away, reminiscing about our victories over the enemies from different streets and villages and competing with each other in casting curses. A few golden butterflies and dragonflies were fluttering around us. The afternoon air was warm and clean, and the town below us seemed like a green harbor full of white sails.

That had been the end of Communism. I had a feeling watching the tape that America would be next, but for once I kept my mouth shut. In my silence I felt our common ground: here we were, two men, neither young, neither with money, neither earning a penny or holding down a job or...

Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy.

[…] The negative turned positive, black misery sublimated into heightened consciousness, suffering into solidarity!

[T]he heart is a very unreliable coinpass, and even will and knowledge, as all ideological factors in general, are not to be trusted as guides if they are without any material basis…. [I]t is not love nor help which is the guiding rule of our time, but hammer or anvil. In reality it is thus:...

Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin), your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.Is it possible that you do not know what a hostage really is — a man imprisoned not because of a crime he has committed, but only because it suits his enemies to exert blackmail on his companions? … If...

During the night two delegates of the railwaymen were arrested. The strikers immediately demanded their release, and as this was not conceded, they decided not to allow trains leave the town. At the station all the strikers with their wives and families sat down on the railway track-a sea of human beings. They were threatened...

Naturally there was the notion of private property as a pragmatic concept, for individuals or groups have a proclivity to tend to their own possessions with greater care and reverence than they would to common property…in such cases, the notion of ownership would underscore a relationship existing between distinct people, rather than a legal association...

Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day that I was born, 13 April 1949, nineteen senior Nazi officials were convicted at Nuremberg, including Hitler’s former envoy to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, who was found guilty of planning aggression...

Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates… Instead, they must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service, should learn to think and act as a mass.

Communism is an aggressive religion of the species.

A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter; Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies.Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its opponents in power? Where the...

In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.

Communists are the last optimists.

If you can convince people that freedom is injustice, they will then believe that slavery is freedom.

While the new Legionnaire man eliminated his enemies in the name of God, with a cross in his hand, the new Communist man eliminated God altogether and stood on His pedestal. They were both equally thirsty for blood.

We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire. We have combined, by a freely adopted decision, for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not...

It was partly the war, the revolution did the rest. The war was an artificial break in life– as if life could be put off for a time– what nonsense! The revolution broke out willy-nilly like a sigh suppressed too long. Everyone was revived, reborn, changed, transformed. You might say that everyone has been through...

Komunizm był szary – truizm, który zatruł umysły. Więc gdy się bohatersko wyzwolilyśmy, pierwszym odruchem była wizyta w sklepie z farbami. I tak teraz wygląda moja ojczyzna: jakby małpa bawiła się pędzlem. Mnie jednak to imponuje. Ta sobiepańskość, to warcholostwo, ta wolność od reguł, od estetycznej poprawności, od napomnień znawców, czasami wręcz od rozumu: bo...

It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.

You’ll see certain Pythagorean whose belief in communism of property goes to such lengths that they pick up anything lying about unguarded, and make off with it without a qualm of conscience as if it had come to them by law.

The fall of moral civilization has always been brought about by those who were “just doing their jobs”.

The winner takes all mindset at the root of capitalism is a poison if left unchecked. That’s not to say capitalism is bad per sē, or that a more refined version of it cannot work effectively. Nor does it mean the world should move toward socialism or communism, which have both proven throughout history to...

Without anarchy, there would be chaos.

Even now we feel that Stalin was devoted to Communism, he was a Marxist, this cannot and should not be denied.

I believe profoundly that in the struggle against Communists and their organizations […] we cannot and should not resort to the methods and forms employed by the Communists.

As is now generally admitted, a Soviet bomb would not have been achieved for several years more but for the success of Soviet espionage in obtaining secret information from Western scientists associated with the Manhattan Project. That is to say, political ideas in the minds of certain capable physicists and others took the form of...

Stalin had developed an interesting new theory: that resistance to socialism increases as its successes mount, because its foes resist with greater desperation as they contemplate their final defeat. Thus any problem in the Soviet Union could be defined as an example of enemy action, and enemy action could be defined as evidence of progress.P....

I don’t approve of mixing ideologies,” Ivanov continued. “There are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles. One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the...

In Labor movements generally, success through violence can hardly be expected except in circumstances where success without violence is attainable.

As a matter of fact I did flirt with Socialism, in my youth.””That when you were in university, was it?”He smiled. “Yes. University. But then I saw how much more comfortable life could be as one of the exploiters rather than one of the exploited. Plus I decided that if the proles were so stupid...

The disdain of profit is due to ignorance, and to an attitude that we may if we wish admire in the ascetic who has chosen to be content with a small share of the riches of this world, but which, when actualised in the form of restrictions on profits of others, is selfish to the...

The greatest purveyor of violence in the world : My own Government, I can not be Silent.

I was not extremely patriotic about Mother Russia. I played their game, pretending. You have to deal with, you know, party people, KGB. Horrifying.

Freedom is indivisible. As soon as one starts to restrict it, one enters upon a decline on which it is difficult to stop.

After all, Malthus was wrong. Marx was wrong. Democracy did not die during the Great Depression as the Communists predicted. And Khrushchev did not ‘bury’ us. We buried him. Neville Chute’s On the Beach proved as fanciful as Dr. Strangelove and Seven Days in May. Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb never exploded. It fizzled. The Clash...