Quotes about collectivism

A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.

Living someone else's dream is truly a nightmare. None should forfeit their life's aspirations to toil for the goals of another. Unity of purpose is a sentence. Collectivism is a crime theft of individual worth.

Individuals can only volunteer their will. The collective has no rights if not by the use of force and coercion. Collectivism is not a collection of individuals It is the complete denial of the individual and its rights. Socialism is not cooperation of individuals it is the denial of individual rights and individual dignity.

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

For anyone who thinks "profit" is evil, I have a challenge for you: try NOT to get any profit in the next week. Profit simply means increasing how much valuable stuff you have, and if you don't profit, you die. Literally. For example, don't buy any food for a week, because when you buy food (or anything), it's because you value the food MORE than you value the money you trade for it. If you didn't, you wouldn't make the trade. So you PROFIT (and so does the seller) every time you buy something.

Collectivist ethical principle: man is not an end to himself, but is only a tool to serve the ends of others. Whether those ‘others’ are a dictator’s gang, the nation, society, the race, (the) god(s), the majority, the community, the tribe, etc., is irrelevant – the point is that man in principle must be sacrificed to others.

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.

LENIN = "Revolutionary Social Democracy"American Socialists = "Democratic Socialism". What is the difference? The USSR held democratic referendums too; all of which increased the power of the central planners and reduced the individual to nothingness.

All Socialism is Democratic Socialism. Socialist nations take away civil liberties by referendum.

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

I think, therefore I am an individual... not a drone in a collective. I think, therefore I am... Libertarian

Thomas More's Utopia was not a recommendation. It was a warning.

Eugenics has always been the escape valve of single payer socialized medicine. Havelock Ellis was writing about them as one and the same prior to the fin-de-siecle. Culling out of control population growth and the economic drain of the incurably sick has always been a part of socialized medicine.

Centrally planned economies are upended by out of control population. Their escape valve is eugenics.

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

Government programs didn’t arise because the people demanded them or because the free market was unable to provide needed services. They arose because the politicians found them to be a convenient way to buy votes with other people’s money, a convenient way to enlarge their own power, a convenient way to reward their political cronies, and a convenient way to keep people dependent on government.

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

Government is a gang, but not merely as meritorious as a private gang because it claims legal legitimacy. It pillages and uses violence but under the cover of law, and seeks legitimacy not through competition but through the myth of the social contract.

People, imperfect and corruptible are society's building blocks. Political theories evading this reality are a catastrophe in waiting.

If collectivizing highly personal medical decisions is evil, then so follows that collectivized medicine is evil.

The vitriol and viciousness is the inevitable result of a government increasingly deciding the vital aspects of people's lives.

FUCK "UNITY"!! What a pathetic way of thinking. How arrogant of Progressives to think that my hopes and dreams mirror their hopes and dreams. What an absolute bore.... what an total lack of originality or individuality... I believe in individual liberty. I am an extremist on the topic of individual liberty, precisely because I value original thinking and original accomplishments. Fuck unity of purpose. Fuck collectivism. My life is not your life. I have my own path. Get out of my way.

Collectivists see the world the way Mr. Magoo did—as one big blur. They homogenize people in a communal blender, sacrificing the discrete features that make us who we are.

The government enforces a monopoly over the production and distribution of its alleged 'services' and brings violence to bear against would-be competitors. In so doing, it reveals the fraud at the heart of its impudent claims and gives sufficient proof that it is not a genuine protector, but a mere protection racket.

If the bulk of the public were really convinced of the illegitimacy of the State, if it were convinced that the State is nothing more nor less than a bandit gang writ large, then the State would soon collapse to take on no more status or breadth of existence than another Mafia gang.

The only common good is the common liberty to pursue individual goods.

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

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.

War has been the necessary and inevitable consequence of the establishment of a monopoly on security.

For Americans, the car is the American way. Jay Gatsby roars through capitalism, individual freedom, and the good life. For China, the train is the metaphor. Everyone's on board, there's no chance to steer, and it's clickety-clack to collectivism's dreams.

Tyranny is the wolf cast by the shadows of sheep.

It is curious to note that when for reasons of conscience, people refuse to kill, they are often exempted from active military duty. But there are no exemptions for people who, for reasons of conscience, refuse to financially support the bureaucracy that actually does the killing. Apparently, the state takes money more seriously than life.

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.

Every socialist is a disguised dictator.

Voting, the be all and end all of modern democratic politicians, has become a farce, if indeed it was ever anything else. By voting, the people decide only which of the oligarchs preselected for them as viable candidates will wield the whip used to flog them and will command the legion of willing accomplices and anointed lickspittles who perpetrate the countless violations of the people’s natural rights. Meanwhile, the masters soothe the masses by assuring them night and day that they — the plun

When people say 'let's do something about it', they mean 'let's get hold of the political machinery so that we can do something to somebody else.' And that somebody is invariably you.

Commerce tends toward rewarding inclusion, broadness, and liberality. Tribal loyalties, ethnic and religious bigotries, and irrational prejudices are bad for business. The merchant class has been conventionally distrusted by tribalist leaders -- from the ancient to the modern world -- precisely because merchantcraft tends to break down barriers between groups.

Libertarians make no exceptions to the golden rule and provide no moral loophole, no double standard, for government. That is, libertarians believe that murder is murder and does not become sanctified by reasons of state if committed by the government. We believe that theft is theft and does not become legitimated because organized robbers call their theft "taxation." We believe that enslavement is enslavement even if the institution committing that act calls it "conscription." In short, the key

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

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

In particular, the State has arrogated to itself a compulsory monopoly over police and military services, the provision of law, judicial decision-making, the mint and the power to create money, unused land ("the public domain"), streets and highways, rivers and coastal waters, and the means of delivering mail...the State relies on control of the levers of propaganda to persuade its subjects to obey or even exalt their rulers.

Not only is democracy mystical nonsense, it is also immoral. If one man has no right to impose his wishes on another, then ten million men have no right to impose their wishes on the one, since the initiation of force is wrong (and the assent of even the most overwhelming majority can never make it morally permissible). Opinions—even majority opinions—neither create truth nor alter facts. A lynch mob is democracy in action. So much for mob rule.

Experience teaches effectually, but brutally. It makes us acquainted with all the effects of an action, by causing us to feel them; and we cannot fail to finish by knowing that fire burns, if we have burned ourselves. For this rough teacher, I should like, if possible, to substitute a more gentle one. I mean Foresight. For this purpose I shall examine the consequences of certain economical phenomena, by placing in opposition to each other those which are seen, and those which are not seen.

Without anarchy, there would be chaos.

Liberty is no less a blessing because oppression has so long darkened the mind that it can not appreciate it.

The instant that any government obtains a monetary printing press, it becomes a deeply dishonest government, empowered to rob people by stealth. A government with the power to print money knows no limits.

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

Ultimately, all arguments against markets are arguments against anarchy. Marx understood this much, at least.

No man can rightfully be required to join, or support, an association whose protection he does not desire.

I wonder how many such men in America would know that Communism, the New Deal, Fascism, Nazism, are merely so-many trade-names for collectivist Statism, like the trade-names for tooth-pastes which are all exactly alike except for the flavouring.

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

A libertarian is somebody who believes, of course, in personal liberty. And liberty is a personal thing; it is not collective. You don’t gain liberty because you belong to a group. So we don’t talk about women’s rights or gay rights or anything else. Everybody has an absolute equal right as an individual, and it comes to them naturally.

We (libertarians) find just as many things to rip on the left as we do on the right. People on the far-left and the far-right are the same exact person to us.

Socialism, or communism as it is sometimes called, is merely a secular religion, where the State becomes a god.

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

The term "totalitarian" was derived from Adolf Hitler's "Total State", which was a "craddle to grave" solution that sought to micro-manage all aspects of humanity.

The road to evil is paved with socialist intentions.

Individualists and collectivists both have been wronged by the government, and we all maintain (consciously or subconsciously) a list of the ways our lives have been diminished by its bureaucracies and actions. One of the differences between the collectivists and the individualists is that those wrongs are front and center for the individualists, whereas the collectivists are blind to those wrongs, or they excuse those wrongs, or they forgive those wrongs. "Use us," the collectivists say, while

If we lose our significance (character) we fall in ruin. The exploiters take over and sell freedom from fear, from guilt, from want. They excuse all corrupt actions. Collective status degenerates the human spirit.

I believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.

It is amazing how desperately the self-proclaimed revolutionaries grope for their own orthodoxy.

Man is not to direct or to be directed anymore than a tree or a cloud or a stoneMan is not to rule or be ruled anymore than a faith or a truth or a loveMan is not to doubt or to be doubted anymore than a wave or a seed or a fireThere is no problem in living which life hasn't answered to its own needAnd we cannot direct, rule, or doubt what is beyond our highest ability to understand we can only be humble before it we can only worship ourselves because we are a part of itThe eye in the leaf is wa

The argument for collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument. The argument for individualism is subtle and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument. And the emotional faculties are more highly developed in most men than the rational, paradoxically or especially even in those who regard themselves as intellectuals

Socialists eat their children. The poets, artists, and radicals are murdered first once statists come into power. Statists abhor free thinking.

For 70 years Democrats bitterly denied being "socialists". Bernie Sanders has done the service of exposing them.

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.

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

Information or allegations reflecting negatively on individuals or groups seen less sympathetically by the intelligentsia pass rapidly into the public domain with little scrutiny and much publicity. Two of the biggest proven hoaxes of our time have involved allegations of white men gang-raping a black woman-- first the Tawana Brawley hoax of 1987 and later the false rape charges against three Duke University students in 2006. In both cases, editorial indignation rang out across the land, without

On the opening day of law school at Yale, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you.

People are not embracing collectivism because they have accepted bad economics. They are accepting bad economics because they have embraced collectivism.

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.

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am -- not stuck in the middle, but hovering above the entire farcical spectrum, weeping as I behold my fellow man's devotion to political illusion and self-destruction.

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.

Growing economies are built by billions of actors behaving according to their own interests, coordinated through institutions that no one in particular created.Realizing this requires humility, a trait that is in short supply among would-be dictators, politicians, and bureaucrats, which is precisely why these groups are the proven enemies of prosperity in all times and places.

Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator. A mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement. He wants them to surrender their consciousness to his assertions, his edicts, his wishes, his whims—as his consciousness is surrendered to theirs. He wants to deal with men by means of faith and force—he finds no satisfaction in their consent if he must earn it by means of facts and reason. Reason is the enemy he dreads and, simultaneously, considers precarious; reason,

When you consider socialism, do not fool yourself about its nature. Remember that there is no such dichotomy as “human rights” versus “property rights.” No human rights can exist without property rights.

There can be no socialism without a state, and as long as there is a state there is socialism. The state, then, is the very institution that puts socialism into action; and as socialism rests on aggressive violence directed against innocent victims, aggressive violence is the nature of any state.

Collectivism is the "philosophy" of every cockroach and sewer rat: "If I want it, I must need it, and if I need it, I have a right to it, and if I have a right to it, it doesn't matter what I have to do to get it." Thefact that such an inherently animalistic, short-sighted, anti-humanviewpoint is now painted by some as compassionate and "progressive" does not make it any more sane, or any less dangerous.

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".

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.

Deprived of the infinite, man has become what he always was: a supernumerary. He hardly counts; he forms part of the troupe called Humanity; if he misses a cue, he is hissed; and if he drops through the trapdoor another puppet is in readiness to take his place.

Even the richest person, provided the riches comes from mutually beneficial exchange, does not need to give anything "back" to the community, because this person took nothing out of the community. Indeed, the reverse is true: Enterprises give to the community. Their owners take huge risks, and front the money for investment, precisely with the goal of serving others. Their riches are signs that they have achieved their aims.

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

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.

Collectives can’t make money from virtues they make money from weakness. Where there are no weak, they create weak. Cowards hate strong people.

He needed the people and the clamour around him. There was no questions and no doubts when he stood on a platform over a sea of faces; the air was heavy, compact, saturated with a single solvent-admiration; there was no room for anything else. He was great; great as the number of people who told him so. He was right; right as the number of people who believed it. He looked at the faces, at the eyes, he saw himself born in them, he saw himself granted the gift of life. That was Peter Keating, tha

Individual liberty may be unable to solve every social problem, but collective violence is unable to solve any social problem.

Individualism turns a band into a society. Collectivism turns society into a mob.

The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave.

I was reading in the paper today that Congress wants to replace the dollar bill with a coin. They’ve already done it. It’s called a nickel.

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.

People and institutions that refuse to admit error eventually discredit themselves.

The great mass of humankind possesses an unmistakable unit-identity. It can be one thing. It can act as a single organism.

I feel ashamed that so many of us cannot imagine a better way to do things than locking children up all day in cells instead of letting them grow up knowing their families, mingling with the world, assuming real obligations, striving to be independent and self-reliant and free.

When the law no longer protects you from the corrupt, but protects the corrupt from you – you know your nation is doomed.

What is peculiar and novel to our age is that the principal goal of politics in every advanced society is not, strictly speaking, a political one, that is today, it is not concerned with human beings as persons and citizens, but with human bodies. ... In all technologically advanced countries today, whatever political label they give themselves, their policies have, essentially, the same goal: to guarantee to every member of society, as a psychophysical organism, the right to physical and mental

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

There is nothing virtuous or noble about being "tolerant" of people whose attitudes and behaviors you approve of. If you don't defend the freedom of even those individuals whose attitudes and behaviors you find disgusting, narrow-minded and offensive, then you are not tolerant. To "tolerate" doesn't mean you like it or approve of it; it means only that you ALLOW it to EXIST--i.e., you refrain from violently interfering. The people who look to "government" to FORCE people to be "nice" are not tol

Socialists and Progressives confuse compassion and compulsion.