Quotes & Sayings About Communist

Totalitarian politics - far from being simply antisemitic or racist or imperialist or communist - use and abuse their own ideological and political elements until the basis of factual reality, from which the ideologies originally derived their strength and their propaganda value - the reality of class struggle, for instance, or the interest conflicts between Jews and their neighbors - have all but disappeared. — Hannah Arendt

He told me that while he was in a Chinese Communist gulag for almost eighteen years, he faced danger on a few occasions. I thought he was referencing a threat to his own life. But when I asked, "What danger?" he answered, "Losing compassion toward the Chinese. — Dalai Lama XIV

Of course, I grew up in Communist Romania, but I am happy to say that now our country is democratic, and prospering, since the revolution in 1989. — Nadia Comaneci

And who can deny that Stalin and Mao, not to mention Pol Pot and a host of others, all committed atrocities in the name of a Communist ideology that was explicitly atheistic? Who can dispute that they did their bloody deeds by claiming to be establishing a "new man" and a religion-free utopia? These were mass murders performed with atheism as a central part of their ideological inspiration, they were not mass murders done by people who simply happened to be atheist. — Dinesh D'Souza

Politics should be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage. — Lucille Ball

I do not give a damn about the dead. They died for the [Communist] Party and the Party can decide what it wants. I practice a live man's politics, for the living. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Vaclav Havel was the most amazing man in terms of being the combination of somebody with massive moral authority, great courage for having espoused the concepts of democracy, freedom throughout a very difficult communist period, a very modest man, and somebody with a fabulous sense of humor and the idea of being able to see the absurd in situations. — Judy Woodruff

It is amazing to a great many of us how Congress ignores the Constitution. For example, the 13th Amendment clearly states: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction." Currently, the average working person pays over forty percent of his earnings to the Government (City, State and National) and IT IS NOT VOLUNTARY! Did the people vote for these taxes? NO! They were imposed by a Communist dominated Congress. Therefore, Congress has declared that each and every wage earner is a SLAVE of the Government and the Government has a right to steal their money. WHY? — Robert Gates Sr.

Any pitcher who throws at a batter and deliberately tries to hit him is a communist. — Alvin Dark

The democratic world has come to a dead end; likewise, the communist world has come to a dead end. But the Unification Church is just beginning! — Sun Myung Moon

Don't you see the rest of the country looks upon New York like we're left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers? I think of us that way sometimes and I live here. — Woody Allen

For us, the idea was not to get involved more than necessary in the fight against the Russians, which was the business of the Americans, but rather to show our solidarity with our Islamist brothers. I discovered that it was not enough to fight in Afghanistan, but that we had to fight on all fronts against communist or Western oppression. The urgent thing was communism, but the next target was America ... This is an open war up to the end, until victory. — Osama Bin Laden

So these Red Sox ... are they a Communist organization? — Fidel Castro

We have retreated from the perennial values. I don't think that we need any new values. The most important thing is to try to revive the universally known values from which we have retreated.
As a young man, I really took to heart the Communist ideals. A young soul certainly cannot reject things like justice and equality. These were the goals proclaimed by the Communists. But in reality that terrible Communist experiment brought about repression of human dignity. Violence was used in order to impose that model on society. In the name of Communism we abandoned basic human values. So when I came to power in Russia I started to restore those values; values of "openness" and freedom. — Mikhail Gorbachev

The correctness of any of our policies has always to be tested and is always being tested by the masses themselves. We ourselves constantly examine our own decisions and policies. We correct our mistakes whenever we find them. We draw conclusions from all positive and negative experiences and apply those conclusions as widely as possible. In these ways relations between the Communist party and the masses of the people are constantly being improved. — Mao Zedong

We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny ... The most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witch hunts, beginning to call anybody they don't like a Communist. — E.B. White

[ ... ] most of the environmental hype [regarding global warming] is really to help bring about Karl Marx's dream (nightmare) of a Communist world. [by reduction, and ultimately elimination of private property rights — Kent Hovind

We pity or condemn the communist peoples of the world for being bound in the chains of doctrine. So are we. Our doctrine runs as follows: Our Way is the Only Way. — Marya Mannes

Because if you lived, as I did, several years under Nazi totalitarianism, and then 20 years in communist totalitarianism, you would certainly realize how precious freedom is, and how easy it is to lose your freedom. — Milos Forman

Although some Clinton biographers have been quick to label Alinsky a communist, he maintained that he never joined the Communist Party. — Bill Dedman

The worker-mother must learn not to differentiate between yours and mine; she must remember that there are only our children, the children of Russia's communist workers. — Alexandra Kollontai

Show me where Stalin is buried and I'll show you a Communist Plot. — Edgar Bergen

Furthermore, some of the best people in the country were connected with the Communist movement in some way, heroes and heroines one could admire. There was Paul Robeson, the fabulous singer-actor-athlete whose magnificent voice could fill Madison Square Garden, crying out against racial injustice, against fascism. And literary figures (weren't Theodore Dreiser and W. E. B. DuBois Communists?), — Howard Zinn

These three conceptual and ideological challenges (Hindu fundamentalism, Communist dictatorship and ethnic separatism) all date to the founding of the nation. To these have, more recently been added, three more mundane and materialist challenges. These are inequality, corruption and environmental degradation. — Ramachandra Guha

Writing music and lyrics, you tend to become a control freak - sitting alone in your room with a bare light bulb over your head, writing communist manifestos. — Jason Robert Brown

Only Communists and Social Democrats who acted against the state were incarcerated. Most of the Communists and Social Democrats I had known became Nazis later. Only those who were doing anything against the state were thrown in concentration camps. — Fritz Sauckel

I believe that we have to strive for a transition to a socialist society ... all the way to communism. I mean I think we should, uh, I think we should all study what the word means and I believe that if everyone knew what the word meant we would all be on our knees praying that we would, as soon as possible, be able to live under, uh, within a communist structure. — Jane Fonda

The teenager seems to have replaced the Communist as the appropriate target for public controversy and foreboding. — Edgar Friedenberg

In Germany they came first for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up
because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up
because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up
because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time no one was left
to speak up for me. — Martin Niemoller

I still call myself a communist, because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of it. — Pete Seeger

I am a Maoist sympathiser. I'm not a Maoist ideologue, because the communist movements in history have been just as destructive as capitalism. — Arundhati Roy

The way she told it, she was such a criminal even the most God-fearing church ladies got bored of reporting on her; she did the marketing on Sunday, dropped by any church she liked or none at all, was a feminist (which Mrs. Asher sometimes confused with communist), a Democrat (which Mrs. Lincoln pointed out practically had "demon" in the word itself), and, worst of all, a vegetarian (which ruled out any dinner invitations from Mrs. Snow). — Kami Garcia

The National Liberation Front was not ... a viable, autonomous organization with a life of its own; it was a facade, a "front," by means of which the DLD (the North Vietnamese Communist Party) sought to mobilize the people in the South to accomplish its ends, and to garner international sympathy and support. — George Allen

I feel the color in my cheeks rising again. I must be the color of The Communist Manifesto. — E.L. James

...it was the very government and the way they treated us that started us on that road. For example, in my case, when they beat me in the DIC cells for being a "communist" and an "extremist" and all that, they awoke a great curiosity in me: "What is communism? What is socialism?" Every day they beat me over the head with that. And I began to ask myself: "What's a socialist country? How are problems solved there? How do people live there? Are the miners massacred there?" And then I began to analyze: "What have I done? What do I want? What do I think? Why am I here? I only asked for justice for the people, I only asked for education to be better, I asked that there be no more massacres like the terrible San Juan massacre. Is that socialism? Is that communism? — Domitila Barrios De Chungara

I said, "Suppose communists come out against cancer, do we have to automatically come out for cancer?'" I can't take back that I'm against the poll tax, that I'm against lynching, that I'm for peace. — Studs Terkel

In 1951, Air Scoop published a long list of organizations that the government had labeled totalitarian, Communist, or subversive, the clear message that affiliation with any of them might jeopardize one's job. — Margot Lee Shetterly

[About the demand of the Board of Regents of the University of California that professors sign non-Communist loyalty oaths or lose their jobs within 65 days.] No conceivable damage to the university at the hands of hypothetical Communists among us could possibly have equaled the damage resulting from the unrest, ill-will and suspicion engendered by this series of events. — Joel Henry Hildebrand

Our stand is that of the proletariat and of the masses. For members of the Communist Party, this means keeping to the stand of the Party, keeping to Party spirit and Party policy. — Mao Zedong

News for the godless: religion is inescapable. there has never been a human society without some form of worship. And don't point to communist societies like the Soviet Union - they worshipped blue jeans. — Stephen Colbert

The Point, not unlike the Communist Chinese, the ACLU abhors individual religious freedom, and it supports only those civil liberties that fit its narrow political agenda. — Mark Hyman, M.D.

A Communist breaks because he must choose at last between irreconcilable opposites-God or Man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or Communism. — Whittaker Chambers

Then he shows up one night, drunk, and screams at Scott in a mixture of German and English, calling Scott the American Communist boiling-potter, a phrase her husband treasures to the end of his days. Scott, far from sober himself (in Germany Scott and sober rarely even exchange postcards), at one point offers the sonofabitching landlord a cigarette and tells him Goinzee on! — Stephen King

More than forty years of Communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe resulted in an unhappy and artificial division of Europe. It is this dark chapter of European history that we now have the opportunity to close. — Anders Fogh Rasmussen

I've always been that contemptible thing, a luxury communist. — Bruce Robinson

I'm still a communist in the sense that I don't believe the world will survive with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer - I think that the pressures will get so tremendous that the social contract will just come apart. — Pete Seeger

Let us instill into the hearts of our children the love of freedom. Teach them that to be free is as precious as life itself. Fight every influence - Socialist, communist, whatever it may be - that would deprive an American citizen of the liberty vouchsafed by the Constitution. Liberty is truth. In truth we find liberty. You teachers, feel it in your hearts; instill it into the hearts of these precious children. May the Church of Jesus Christ ever stand true to the ideals of freedom. — David O. McKay

After visits to several Communist countries (USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Slovenia, East Germany, Vietnam, China, Cuba), I feel strongly that most "revolutionary" types around the world don't realize the importance of freedom of the press and the air, a right to peaceably assemble and discuss anything, including the dangers of such discussions. — Pete Seeger

Seventy years after Marx's death, one third of the human race lived under regimes ruled by communist parties which claimed to represent his ideas and realise his aspirations. — Eric Hobsbawm

A communist is like a crocodile: when it opens its mouth you cannot tell whether it is trying to smile or preparing to eat you up. — Winston Churchill

I want to be the first guy to reverse a communist revolution. — Elliott Abrams

Certainly not a party of the workers and the peasants. In fact, Jiang Zemin in recent weeks has officially said that capitalists and the entrepreneurs should be enrolled in the Communist Party. — Henry A. Kissinger

The Animal Farm is a well written book in comprehensive english. George Orwell compares the communist Russian political system trying to make a point that that system was using people that didn't have a critical mind. What Orwell didn't see is that this attitude can be found in all the political systems where is no supervising and rotation of work.We see corruption in every country.Specialy in countries that are ruled by capitalism systems like Britain and America.I can't say that communism system was bad because people had free education and housing and they didn't have to borrow money from the bank. I believe that Orwell has been sarcastic and he was serving his country not the human race. — George Orwell

Self-important western journalists who'd given up their sacred trust to become cheerleaders for trendy causes, the way communist journalists had once been cheerleaders for the government ... They were depriving the free world of its most valuable weapon in condemning and exposing the worst human scourge since Nazism: the targeting and murder of civilians to achieve political and religious ends. — Naomi Ragen

The first exhibition [Publo Picasso] was organized by the communist party - because of his position during the war and all that. — Agnes Varda

Without the communist oppression, I am absolutely sure I would now be a local stupid professor of philosophy in Ljubljana. — ZIZEK

The dynamic character of China's nonstatist economic transformation, including its social openness to the rest of the world, is not mutually compatible in the long run with a relatively closed and bureaucratically rigid Communist dictatorship. — Zbigniew Brzezinski

Shock therapy has arguably created a large block of politicized people ready to vote for someone, perhaps a militarist, a quasifascist, or an old-style Communist, to undo the transitional order that has harmed them. — Russell Hardin

The Communists at that moment were very strong in Italy, and the Italian Communist Party was the biggest Communist Party outside the Soviet Union. — Giovanni Agnelli

Meditation means a state of unconditioned mind. Meditation is the process of undoing the harm that every society goes on doing to every individual - communist or Catholic, Jaina or Jew, it does not matter. I am not talking about any particular conditioning that is wrong; I am saying conditioning AS SUCH is wrong. — Rajneesh

Soviet authorities had long feared copiers. At its most basic, the machine helped spread information, and strict control of information was central to the Communist Party's grip on power. In most offices, photocopy machines were kept under lock and key. — David E. Hoffman

We were leaving a pleasant region, an Oriental farmer's paradise, that was more prosperous and secure under communist control than the area around Bong Son was under ARVN control. I wondered if the form of government really mattered to those peasant farmers. — Matthew Brennan

When we, in the communist countries, came across the ideas of Hayek and Aron, we had no problems to understand their importance. They gave us the much needed explanation of the somewhat peculiar prominence of intellectuals in our own society of that time. Our intellectuals, of course, did not like to hear it and did not want to recognize it because their peculiar prominence coexisted with the very debilitating absence of intellectual freedom, which the intellectuals value very highly. — Vaclav Klaus

In insisting that peasant activity contrary to Communist policies could be defined as kulak while at the same time maintaining that his approach to the peasantry was based on scientific Marxist class analysis, Lenin provided his successors with conceptualizations that would be used in collectivization when Stalin launched a war against all peasants. — Lynne Viola

This time we'll hate, alright - but we'll hate the ENEMY - the vicious gang of colored scum attackers and Jewish-Communist traitors - rather than one part of our own people hating another part for the benefit of the Jews and their army of SCUM! — George Lincoln Rockwell

"Cap and trade" is just about the most effective tool for controlling most economic activity short of openly declaring ourselves a communist nation and it's a radical environmentalist's dream come true. — Walter E. Williams

President Reagan was a leader at a time when the American people most needed leadership. He outlined a vision that captured the imagination of the free world, a vision that toppled the Communist empire and freed countless millions. — Dennis Hastert

The word communist, of course, has become a rallying cry for certain people here just as the word Jew was in Hitler's Germany, a way of arousing emotion without engendering thought. — Eleanor Roosevelt

I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves. — Henry A. Kissinger

Sometimes when I observe contemporary U.S. culture, with its hard fronts and nasty culture wars, I have a strange sense that I've seen something like it before - in the Communist and semitotalitarian state in which I grew up. The issues and positions are very different, but the spirit is strangely familiar. In all public discussion, there was a party line that people had to toe; if you diverged, you were deemed disloyal and suspected of betraying the cause. I sense a similar spirit today among both progressives and conservatives in the United States when it comes to many hot-button issues, including Islam. — Miroslav Volf

I mean, what are they scared of? Who's going to vote for anyone from the Communist Party, for God's sake? — Tim Robbins

The French Revolution gave rise to ideas which led beyond the ideas of the entire old world order. The revolutionary movement which began in 1789 ... gave rise to the communist idea which Babeuf's friend Buonarroti re-introduced in France after the Revolution of 1830. This idea, consistently developed, is the idea of the new world order. — Karl Marx

Complaining that a comic is drunk is like going to a titty bar and complaining because your lapdancer is a communist. — Doug Stanhope

Mr. Speaker, in 1848, Karl Marx said, a progressive income tax is needed to transfer wealth and power to the state. Thus, Marx's Communist Manifesto had as its major economic tenet a progressive income tax. Think about it, 1848 Karl Marx, Communism ... I say it is time to replace the progressive income tax with a national retail sales tax, and it is time to abolish the IRS, my colleagues. I yield back all the rules, regulations, fear, and intimidation of our current system. — James Traficant

The Communist Party said that I must finish my studies because after the revolution in Germany people would be required with technical knowledge to take part in the building of the Communist Germany. — Klaus Fuchs

What my Republican colleagues often don't understand is that labor is a human-rights issue. I have to remind them Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement brought down the Communist bloc. — Chris Smith

And you spend your day going around from the house of the washerman to the house of the sweeper, asking about this one's son and that one's nephew, but spending no time with your own family. It is no secret that many people here think that you are a communist.'
Rasheed reflected that this probably meant only that he loathed the poverty and injustice endemic to the village, and that he made no particular secret of it. — Vikram Seth

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeosis epoch from all earlier ones. — Karl Marx

What does Karl Marx put on his pasta? Communist Manipesto! — Stephen Colbert

All our officers and fighters must always bear in mind that we are the great People's Liberation Army, we are the troops led by the great Communist Party of China. Provided we constantly observe the directives of the Party, we are sure to win. — Mao Zedong

The income tax is bad because it was conceived in class hatred, is an instrument of vengeance and plays right into the hands of the communists. It employs the vicious communist principle of taking from each according to his accumulation of the fruits of his labor and giving to others according to their needs, regardless of whether those needs are the result of indolence, or lack of pride, self-respect, personal dignity or other attributes of men. — T. Coleman Andrews

This could seem counterintuitive for many dictators running communist or socialist single-party states, but a thriving private tech industry can contribute invaluable tools to help you implement a controllable internet. The reason is fairly simple: the technologies that transform internet applications into more personalized, efficient and enjoyable experiences are usually the same ones that increase the capacity to monitor its users. — Laurier Rochon

As to the efficacy of the policy recommended by Rostow, it speaks for itself: no country, once underdeveloped, ever managed to develop By Rostow's stages. Is that why Rostow is now trying to help the people of Vietnam, the Congo, the Dominican Republic, and other underdeveloped countries to overcome the empirical, theoretical, and policy shortcomings of his manifestly non-communist intellectual aid to economic development and cultural change by bombs, napalm, chemical and biological weapons, and military occupation? — Andre Gunder Frank

I grew up in communist Russia where we didn't have anything, so I'm not worried that I can't buy an extra pair of shoes. — Margarita Levieva

Why not be a communist, she thinks, if it means that kind of belonging? — David Rakoff

Finally, a prominent nation is taking on the homosexual agenda and rejecting it outright. A number of African nations have done the same, but third-world countries are not newsworthy to mainstream media. The irony is stunning that a Communist nation would understand that preserving the value of men and women marrying and producing children makes for demographic survival, while many American Christian leaders cower in the shadows, in fear of activist homosexuals and their leftist supporters. I say 'cheers' to the Russians on this one. That nation will probably outlive America. — Sylvia Thompson

This school is enough to make anyone a communist. — Jo Walton

We believe in a moral code. Communism denies innate right or wrong. As W. Cleon Skousen has said in his timely book, The Naked Communist: The communist 'has convinced himself that nothing is evil which answers the call of expediency.' This is a most damnable doctrine. People who truly accept such a philosophy have neither conscience nor honor. Force, trickery, lies, broken promises are wholly justified. — Ezra Taft Benson

Of course you have a duty to show the disfigurations of society as well as its more agreeable aspects. But if TV in the western world uses its freedom continually to show all that is worst in our society, while the centrally controlled television of the Communist world and the dictatorships show only what is judged advantageous to them and suppress everything else, how are the uncommitted to judge between us? How can they fail to misjudge if they view matters only through a distorted mirror? — Margaret Thatcher

The enemy of the black is not the white. The enemy of capitalist is not communist, the enemy of homosexual is not heterosexual, the enemy of Jew is not Arab, the enemy of youth is not the old, the enemy of hip is not redneck, the enemy of Chicano is not gringo and the enemy of women is not men. We all have the same enemy. The enemy is the tyranny of the dull mind. The enemy is every expert who practices technocratic manipulation, the enemy is every proponent of standardization and the enemy is every victim who is so dull and lazy and weak as to allow himself to be manipulated and standardized. — Tom Robbins

Unlike the Soviet Communist party, the Chinese Communist party chose to introduce capitalism. — Martin Jacques

Santa Claus wears a Red Suit, he must be a communist. And a beard and long hair, must be a pacifist. What's in that pipe that he's smoking? — Arlo Guthrie

It was the United States, after all, which poured resources into the 1980s war against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, at a time when girls could go to school and women to work. Bin Laden and his mojahedin were armed and trained by the CIA and MI6, as Afghanistan was turned into a wasteland and its communist leader Najibullah left hanging from a Kabul lamp — Seumas Milne

They sent spies", Gramma went on, her voice a hush, "and they look like one man, but they can split into two, then four, and so on. I've seen it before. During the war. It's a Communist trick and they taught it to the Democrats so that they could take our guns. I would have fought them off, but they already made the shotgun disappear. — Barry Lyga

People are very much wrought up about the Communist bugaboo. — Harry S. Truman

But my knowledge of Marxism was limited to knowing that Marx was a Jew, and that he had a long white beard. I said to Lunatcharsky (the political communist commissar for Education, 1918, fh) 'Whatever you do, don't ask me why I painted in blue or green, and why you can see a calf inside the cow's belly, etc. On the other hand you're welcome: if Marx is so wise, let him come back to life and explain it himself'. I showed him my canvases. — Marc Chagall

I'm a Communist, fully convinced and dedicated to my cause. — Italo Calvino

[Taken from a BBC documentary]
Tariq was born in Lahore, now in Pakistan, then part of British-ruled India, in 1943. A Catholic school education did nothing to shake his life-long atheism, which he shared with his communist parents. — Tariq Ali

The women are threatening, because, among other reasons, they are not virgins. The sexual experience that nationalist soldiers sense in them seems to release a particularly powerful fear. That fear is brought into association with the word communist — Anonymous

For more than a decade, the United States had been giving large-scale military aid to the French colonialists, and then to the American-installed but authoritarian South Vietnamese government, to fight nationalists and communists in Vietnam. More than 23,000 U.S. military advisers were there by the end of 1964, occasionally engaging in combat. On the other side of the world, the American public knew and cared little about the guerrilla war. In fact, few knew exactly where Vietnam was. Nevertheless, people were willing to go along when their leaders told them that action was essential to resist communist aggression. — Edward S. Greenberg