Answers To Questions About Socialism

"Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security." - Benjamin Franklin.


"I don't like the income tax. Every time we talk about these taxes we get around to the idea of 'from each according to his capacity and to each according to his needs'. That's socialism. It's written into the Communist Manifesto. Maybe we ought to see that every person who gets a tax return receives a copy of the Communist Manifesto with it so he can see what's happening to him." - T. Coleman Andrews, Commissioner of Internal Revenue, May 25, 1956 in U.S.
News & World Report

"Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle." - George Washington

"Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy." - Winston Churchill

"To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, 'the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry, and the fruits acquired by it.
'" - Thomas Jefferson

"Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom; socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." - Alexis de Tocqueville, Discours pronounce a l'assemblee constituante le 12 septembre 1848 sur la question du droit at travail

"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

"Socialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good." - Ayn Rand

"Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it." - Thomas Sowell

And the quote the government wants you to believe was never uttered:

"Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable - a most sacred right - a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world." - Abraham Lincoln