A Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I hope that no one present will suspect me of offering my personal criticism of the Western system to present socialism as an alternative. Having experienced applied socialism in a country where the alternative has been realized, I certainly will not speak for it. The well-known Soviet mathematician Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, has written a brilliant book under the title Socialism; it is a profound analysis showing that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.
Socialism of any type leads to a total destruction of the human spirit...
We have to re-invent socialism. It can't be the kind of socialism that we saw in the Soviet Union, but it will emerge as we develop new systems that are built on cooperation, not competition.
This much I would say: Socialism has failed all over the world. In the eighties, I would hear every day that there is no inflation in the Soviet Union, there is no poverty in the Soviet Union, there is no unemployment in the Soviet Union. And now we find that, due to Socialism, there is no Soviet Union!
Socialism constitutes a threat to the present and future welfare of the human race, in the sense that neither socialism nor any other known substitute for the market order could sustain the current population of the world.
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.
Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.
They [the Soviets] intend...to induce the Americans to adopt their own 'restructuring' and convergence of the Soviet and American systems using to this end the fear of nuclear conflict.... Convergence will be accompanied by blood baths and political re-education camps in Western Europe and the United States. The Soviet strategists are counting on an economic depression in the United States and intend to introduce their reformed model of socialism with a human face as an alternative to the American system during the depression.
Whether considered as a doctrine, or as an historical fact, or as a movemement, socialism, if it really remains socialism, cannotbe brought into harmony with the dogmas of the Catholic church.... Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are expressions implying a contradiction in terms.
And the only forms of socialism in the world that were then getting results - malign ones, as it was - were the Fascist and Soviet republics. Fascism is a form of socialism - you rebuild the country, you find a scapegoat, and you go from there.
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?
This old Germany was partly defeated in its conflict with the progressive ideas of socialism, for it had given the people nothing that could serve as a successful alternative to socialism.
Either the USSR was not the country of socialism, in which case socialism didn't exist anywhere and doubtless, wasn't possible: or else, socialism was that, this abominable monster, this police state, the power of beasts of prey.
I was part of a generation that believed in socialism and finally found that belief corroded and destroyed. That is not renouncing Communism or socialism. It's reaching a certain degree of enlightenment about what the Soviet Union practices.
We must ever keep in mind that collectivized socialism is part of the communist strategy. Communism is fundamentally socialism. We will never win our fight against communism by making concessions to socialism.
Everything brought forward in favor of Socialism during the last hundred years, in thousands of writings and speeches, all the blood which has been spilt by the supporters of Socialism, cannot make socialism workable.
States can be more or less democratic, and so can socialism. I think any ideal society that exists on a large scale, which is what we most likely have in store for us as a human race, will involve some aspects of socialism.
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