"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern." - Lord Acton
"The worst form of inequality is to make unequal things equal." - Aristotle
"The State is the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else." - Frédéric Bastiat
"When socialist governments 'abolish' property, what they promise is that the entire community will own the property. But since only one person can eat a particular apple, sleep in a particular bed, or stand on a particular spot, someone will have to decide who. That someone -- the party offical or the bureaucrat, or the czar -- is the real possessor of the property right." - David Boaz
"A socialist is merely a thief who's got the government to go along with him." - Darwin Branch
"The socialists wished not to abolish the Industrial Revolution but to take it over to retain the effects, material prosperity, while eliminating the cause, political and economic freedom." - Nathaniel Branden
"What was wrong with communism wasn't aberrant leadership, it was communism" - William F. Buckley, Jr.
"In 1989, I took an oath 'to defend the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,'and nowhere in my military contract did it say that 'This oath is no longer binding upon expiration of my term of service.' Translation: It's time to get rid of all the Trotskyites in this country." - Buff
"We are going to give a little something, a few little years more, to socialism, because socialism is defunct. It dies all by itself. The bad thing is that socialism, being a victim of its ... Did I say socialism?" - Fidel Castro
"Equality, in a social sense, may be divided into that of condition and that of rights. Equality of condition is incompatible with civilization... In practice, it can only mean a common misery." - James Fenimore Cooper
"Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies." - Honore de Balzac
"By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more." - Albert Camus
Socialist: One who believes in stealing other's property by force of law.
Hypocrite: A Socialist who proclaims a belief in fairness. - ChadManMN, Fark Comments"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy." - Winston Churchill
"The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money." - Alexis de Tocqueville
"Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned." - Milton Friedman
"If government is to exercise power, better in the county than in the state, better in the state than in Washington, D.C. because if I do not like what my local community does, I can move to another community… and if I do not like what my state does, I can move to another. But if I do not like what Washington D.C. imposes, I have few alternatives in this world of jealous nations." - Milton Friedman
"We've moved from an era of galloping socialism to an era of creeping socialism, but what we now need is an era of declining socialism." - Milton Friedman
"[Some] well-meaning people care so deeply about right and wrong, they have no time to distinguish between true and false." - David Gelernter
"A committee, Heinlein said, is a life form with at least six legs and no brain. A Swedish committee is no different, except that it's also socialist, shivering, and a slave to fashion-think." - Stephen Green
"Marx was a complete dolt who had no idea what he was talking about." - A. James Gregor
"A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away." - Barry Goldwater
"What is a committee? A group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit, to do the unnecessary." - Richard Harkness, The New York Times, 1960
"'Social justice' is the trojan horse through which totalitarian governments are formed." - Frederick Augustus Von Hayek
“Defense of Nazi mass murder is not acceptable in the scholarly world, and shouldn’t be. But another species of historical revisionism, one that is equally repugnant, is practiced with impunity in the academy. The number of apologists for the former Soviet Union and its mass murders dwarfs the handful of aberrant pro-Nazi academics in America. Sympathy for the Communist project and distaste for attacking it are today fully accepted in American higher education.” - John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr
"It would be almost worth saving the lives of Europeans for the chance to run around willy-nilly, murdering communists, I have to admit." - Heraclitus
"When you put your faith in 'big government' for any reason, you end up an apologist for mass murder" - Karl Hess
"When a bully demands $10, meets resistance, and presents a compromise of $8, only in government is the payment of the $8 considered a savings of $2. This is how inalienable rights have always been eroded." - Curt Howland
"Sometimes I wonder what would happen to the far Left if they turned off Rage Against the Machine and actually entered reality." - KR
"Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive... those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C.S. Lewis
"The only thing that saves us from government bureaucracy is its inefficiency." - Eugene McCarthy
"Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies." - H. L. Mencken
"The State is the coldest of all cold monsters that bites with stolen teeth." - Nietzsche
"I know about people who talk about suffering for the common good. It's never bloody them! When you hear a man shouting "Forward, brave comrades!" you'll see he's the one behind the bloody big rock and the one wearing the only really arrow-proof helmet!"-- Rincewind gives a speech on politics, Terry Pratchett's Interesting Times
"I wonder how many of the people who profess to believe in the leveling ideas of collectivism and egalitarianism really just believe that they themselves are good for nothing. I mean, how many leftists are animated by a quite reasonable self-loathing? In their hearts they know that they are not going to become scholars or inventors or industrialists or even ordinary good kind people. So they need a way to achieve that smugness for which the left is so justifiably famous. They need a way to achieve self-esteem without merit. Well, there is politics. In an egalitarian world everything will be controlled by politics, and politics requires no merit." - P.J. O'Rourke
"I'm a registered Republican and consider socialism a violation of the American principle that you shouldn't stick your nose in other people's business except to make a buck." - P.J. O'Rourke
"You can't get good chinese takeout in China and cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba. That's all you need to know about communism." - P.J. O'Rourke
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." - William Pitt
"You can't go around building a better world for people. Only [other] people can build a better world for [themselves]. Otherwise it's just a cage." - Terry Pratchett
"Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel." - John Quinton
"'Lobbying' is the activity of attempting to influence legislation by privately influencing the legislators. It is the result and creation of a mixed economy--of government by pressure groups. Its methods range from mere social courtesies and cocktail-party or luncheon 'friendships' to favors, threats, bribes, blackmail." - Ayn Rand, "The Pull Peddlers"
"How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin." - Ronald Reagan
"Typically, we think of CEOs as capitalists. A few aren't capitalists, but collectivists, or statists. They use government to achieve their ends with tariffs and taxes and by paying their favorite senators." - TJ Rodgers
"The difference between a socialist and a communist is like the difference between butter and I Can't Believe It's Not Butter." - Andy Scott
"Unions hate the notion that someone can make a living without the union getting "their" cut. I never realized how much unions were like the mob's protection schemes." - Chakat, Slashdot Talkback
"National Health Insurance means combining the efficiency of the Postal Service with the compassion of the IRS .... and the cost accounting of the Pentagon." - Louis Sullivan/Connie Horner quoted by Novak in Forbes
"[Reagan and I] knew, too, what did not work, namely socialism in every shape or form. Nowadays socialism is more often dressed up as environmentalism, feminism, or international concern for human rights. All sound good in the abstract. But scratch the surface and you will as likely as not discover anti-capitalism, patronising and distorting quotas, and intrusions upon the sovereignty and democracy of nations." - Margaret Thatcher
"The Ten Commandments contain 297 words, the Bill of Rights 463 words, and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address 266 words. A recent federal directive regulating the price of cabbage contains 26,911 words." - According to an article in the New York Times
"Power does not corrupt, so much as it attracts the corruptible. It reveals those of us who revel in control and always seek more." - TheYeti
"The left's reluctance to acknowledge that Communism wasn't just a failure but an evil is due to more than stubbornness. Such an acknowledgment would amount to (1) validating a view of the West, Communism's Cold War adversary, as good (albeit imperfect), and (2) admitting that the left spent much of the 20th century cozying up to mass murderers and therefore has precious little moral authority to criticize the West today." - Cathy Young