Collectivism Quotes

“A hand gets way cleaner from washing, not itself, but the other hand.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Socialism is submission of the masochistic masses to the will of the sadistic elites.”
― A.E. Samaan, From a "Race of Masters" to a "Master Race": 1948 to 1848

“People, imperfect and corruptible are society's building blocks. Political theories evading this reality are a catastrophe in waiting.”
― A.E. Samaan

“The three hypostasis of egoism are: individualism, nationalism, collectivism. The democratic trinity.”
― Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Don Colacho's Aphorisms

“You are so... human. You still think it has to be someone. It wasn't anyone, it was all of you.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“Why?' Said Harry. 'For the big idea, Oliver. Someone comes up with the big idea - could be religion, could be politics, could be the race you belong to, or your clan, or philosophy, or economics, or your sex or just how many bleeding guineas you got stashed in the counting house. Doesn't matter, because the big idea is always the same - wouldn't it be good if only EVERYONE was the same as ME -if only everyone else thought and acted and worshipped and looked like me, everything would become a paradise on earth.
'But people are too different, too diverse to fit into one way of acting or thinking or looking. And that's where the trouble starts. That's when they show up at your door to make the ones who don't fit vanish, when, frustrated by the lack of progress and your stupidity and plain wrongness at not appreciating the perfection of the big idea, they start trying to to shave off the imperfections. Using knives and racks and axe-men and camps and Gideon's Collars. When you see a difference in a person and can find only wickedness in it - you and them - the THEM become fair game, not people anymore but obstacles to the greater good, and it's always open season on THEM.”
― Stephen Hunt, The Court of the Air

“The respect for the individual, which Radin lists as an aboriginal attribute, deserves to be emphasized, today, in an era that rejects the collective as destructive of individuality on the one hand, and, yet, in an orgy of pure egotism, has actually destroyed all the ego boundaries of free-floating, isolated, and atomized individuals on the other hand. A strong collectivity may be even more supportive of the individual, as close studies of certain aboriginal societies reveal, than a “free market” society with emphasis on an egoistic, but impoverished, self.”
― Murray Bookchin, Remaking Society

“Capitalism believes in collectivism for itself and individualism for its enemies.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Superstition of Divorce

“We humans have a dual nature—we are selfish primates who long to be a part of something larger and nobler than ourselves. We are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. If you take that claim metaphorically, then the groupish and hivish things that people do will make a lot more sense. It’s almost as though there’s a switch in our heads that activates our hivish potential when conditions are just right.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“I saw the significance of this pattern immediately. The men all had individual opinions. The feminists all had the same opinion. The men embraced individualism. The feminists embraced collectivism.”
― Mike Adams, Feminists Say the Darndest Things: A Politically Incorrect Professor Confronts "Womyn" on Campus

“The values of solidarity, collectivism, and internationalism are not so much desirable as they are actually mandated by nature and reality itself.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Quotable Hitchens from Alcohol to Zionism: The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens

“There is nothing surprising about the European Union. It’s the medieval Catholic Church resurrected as a secular institution. The British are Protestants who couldn’t stand being in a Catholic Union. That’s really why Brexit happened. In the America presidential election, why was Hillary Clinton so hated? It was because she was perceived as a kind of Pope (President) in charge of the Washington D.C. Establishment (the Church). She was an expert, and experts are hated by ordinary Americans. Why did Donald Trump prove so successful? It was because he was an extreme individualistic narcissist, exactly like so many Protestant Americans. Naturally, he himself is a Protestant.”
― Joe Dixon, The Liberty Wars: The Trump Time Bomb

“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 or in a way that enhances your own possibilities in the world. Would others see choosing a life for self as selfish? These women had to maintain some ambiguity because they were wandering into dangerous territory when they wanted to travel just to enjoy themselves, or keep working and not marry. In a society that honored the cultivation of a larger self, would they themselves someday suffer for having chosen the self-centered way?”
― Nancy Ross Rosenberger, Dilemmas of Adulthood: Japanese Women and the Nuances of Long-Term Resistance

“Forever seeking Archimedean levers for prying the world in directions they prefer, progressives say they embrace high-speed rail for many reasons—to improve the climate, increase competitiveness, enhance national security, reduce congestion, and rationalize land use. The length of the list of reasons, and the flimsiness of each, points to this conclusion: the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.”
― George Will

“In the second place, however, history is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant — the historical event. This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed. Thus history has proceeded hitherto in the manner of a natural process and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that the wills of individuals — each of whom desires what he is impelled to by his physical constitution and external, in the last resort economic, circumstances (either his own personal circumstances or those of society in general) — do not attain what they want, but are merged into an aggregate mean, a common resultant, it must not be concluded that they are equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to the resultant and is to this extent included in it.”
― Friedrich Engels, On Historical Materialism

“On the subject of social wealth, an attempt has been made to establish a distinction between two kinds, and has even managed to divide the socialist party over this distinction. The school which today is called collectivist, substituting for the collectivism of the old International (which was only anti-authoritarian communism) a sort of doctrinaire collectivism, has tried to establish a distinction between capital which is used for production and wealth which is used to supply the necessities of life. Machinery, factories, raw materials, means of communication, and land on one side, and homes, manufactured goods, clothing, foodstuffs on the other, the former becoming collective property, the latter intended, according to the learned representatives of this school, to remain individual property.
There has been an attempt to set up this distinction, but popular good sense has got the better of it; it has found it illusory and impossible to establish. It is vicious in theory and fails in practical life. The workers understand that the house which shelters us, the coal and gas we burn, the fuel consumed by the human machine to sustain life, the clothing necessary for existence, the book we read for instruction, even the enjoyments we get, are all so many component parts of our existence, are all as necessary to successful production and the progressive development of humanity as machines, manufactories, raw materials, and other means of working. The workers are arriving at the conclusion that to maintain private property for this sort of wealth would be to maintain inequality, oppression, exploitation, to paralyze beforehand the results of the partial expropriation. Leaping over the fence set up in their path by theoretical collectivism, they are marching straight for the simplest and most practical form of anti-authoritarian communism.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology

“If these propositions are sound, there is no antagonism between social and individual interests. That alone is good for "society" which is good for all its members. To ask any number of individuals to sacrifice themselves for "society"—that is, for the rest of the membership—is to deprive them of every motive for wishing to lead a social life. The individual has no need for society, if it does not tend to increase his happiness.”
― Frank H Brooks, The Individualist Anarchists: Anthology of Liberty, 1881-1908

“In the final analysis, the relation of the individual to society must not be conceived after the atomistic and mechanistic pattern of bourgeois individualism which destroys the organic social totality, or after the biological and animal pattern of the statist or racist totalitarian conception which swallows up the person, here reduced to a mere histological element of Behemoth or Leviathan, in the body of the state, or after the biological and industrial pattern of the Communistic conception which ordains the entire person, like a worker in the great human hive, to the proper work of the social whole. The relation of the individual to society must be conceived after an irreducibly human and specifically ethicosocial pattern, that is, personalist and communalist at the same time; the organization to be accomplished is one of liberties. But an organization of liberty is is unthinkable apart from the amoral realities of justice and civil amity, which, on the natural and temporal plane, correspond to what the Gospel calls brotherly love on the spiritual and supernatural plane. This brings us back to our considerations of the manner in which the paradox of social life is resolved in a progressive movement that will never be terminated here-below. There is a common work to be accomplished by the social whole as such. This whole, of which human person are the parts, is not ‘neutral’ but is itself committed and bound by a temporal vocation. Thus the persons are subordinated to this common work. Nevertheless, not only in the political order, is it essential to the common good to flow back upon the persons, but also in another order where that which is most profound in the person, its supra-temporal vocation and the goods connected with it, is a transcendent end, it is essential that society itself and its common work are indirectly subordinated. This follows from the fact that the principal value of the common work of society is the freedom of expansion of the person together with all the guarantees which this freedom implies and the diffusion of good that flows from it. In short, the political common good is a common good of human persons. And thus it turns out that, in subordinating oneself to this common work, by the grace of justice and amity, each one of us is trill subordinated to the good of persons, to the accomplishment of the personal life of others an, at the same time, to the interior dignity of ones own person. But for this solution to be practical, there must be full recognition in the city of the true nature of the common work and, at the same time, recognition also of the importance and political worth--so nicely perceived by Aristotle--of the virtue of amity.”
― Jacques Maritain, Person and the Common Good

“The world is constructed in such a way as to relieve each of us of the responsibility of doing any personal good. We’re all free to do bad in a thousand ways, but good is always someone else’s affair. In our societies, the state has a monopoly on good. In order for a society to function in even the most basic way, the state has to have a monopoly on violence – but even more crucial is for the state to have a monopoly on good.”
― Christos Ikonomou, Το καλό θα 'ρθει από τη θάλασσα

“Playing Russian Roulette puts you in a 1 in 6 chance of ending your life. Converting your nation’s economy to Socialism is about a 9 out of 10 chance that you will collapse the economy, eradicate your individual rights, and end life as you know it. Playing Russian Roulette is, incredibly, the more sane choice of the two.”
― A.E. Samaan

“Capitalism celebrates the freedom of disparity, Communism propagandises the equality of misery.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Ah, we've had so many masters,
Swine or eagle, lean or fat one:
Some were tiers, some hyenas,
Still we fed this one and that one.
Whether one is better than the other:
Ah, one boot is always like another
When it treads upon you. What I say about them
Is we need no other masters: we can do without them!

Yes, the wheel is always turning madly,
Neither side stays up or down,
But the water underneath fares badly
For it has to make the wheel go round.

(Ach, wir hatten viele Herren
Hatten Tiger und Hyänen
Hatten Adler, hatten Schweine
Doch wir nährten den und jenen.
Ob sie besser waren oder schlimmer:
Ach, der Stiefel glich dem Stiefel immer
Und uns trat er. Ihr versteht, ich meine
Dass wir keine andern Herren brauchen, sondern keine!

Freilich dreht das Rad sich immer weiter
Dass, was oben ist, nicht oben bleibt.
Aber für das Wasser unten heisst das leider
NurL dass es das Rad halt ewig treibt.)”
― Bertolt Brecht, Selected Poems

“Never forget, you see the dreamworld, not the dreamer, you see the construct, not the constructor, you see the World, not the World Builder. The World Builder is the unseen Cosmic Mind, made of unseen monadic minds, the cells of the Hive. The Big Bang was nothing but an explosion of dream content from every individual monadic mind to create a single, collective dream – aka the World.”
― Thomas Stark, Hive-Mind Dreaming: The Amazing World of Collective Dreaming

“For the Hive Mind to function properly, every member of the Hive needs to understand what is going on. Only then can it do its proper job. We can have the dreams of the gods! We can build heaven on earth. Unfortunately, if people don’t comprehend what the Hive Mind truly is and their place in it is then we get hell instead. We get this exact world we’re in right now – a screwed-up Hive Mind, a Hive where the members of the Hive have viciously turned on each other. We need to clean out the Hive. We need to get it working properly. That means everyone needs to know about this book. Spread the good word!”
― Thomas Stark, Hive-Mind Dreaming: The Amazing World of Collective Dreaming

“The world is a collective dream, and we are its dreamers, hence we can change it – if we all cooperate. Nothing is more important than the realization that we can literally alter “material” reality with our minds, but we have to collaborate or we can achieve nothing. Just as the individual mind can change an individual dream effortlessly, the collective mind can effortlessly the change the collective dream, but only if minds are indeed working collectively, with common, directed intent.”
― Thomas Stark, Tractatus Logico-Mathematicus: How Mathematics Explains Reality

“People endorse negative liberty - the individual free of the State - and hate positive liberty - the individual harnessed by the State.”
― Steve Madison, The Quality Agenda: The Search for Excellence

“This is not to say that individuality is the enemy and freedom of choice should be threatened but it is worth some contemplation when the ‘I’ comes at the cost of the ‘we’, what is left of you when the ‘us’ is gone?”
― Aysha Taryam

“Many young nations around the world are actively forgoing their cultural collectivist norms in the hopes of successfully mimicking these ‘First-World countries’ yet when we look closely and delve deeper into the nature of a nation which has nurtured people through severing human bonds and tightening social circles, we see that when faced with collective suffering, we cannot expect to face it by individual healing.”
― Aysha Taryam

“It’s time to transform the world. Only positive liberty can produce the necessary alchemy. Why should humanity be content with being free from interference? Why doesn’t it want to become something wondrous? How do you become a god? By being left alone, left to your own devices? Or do you become a god when the State invests everything in you, and provides the framework, the machinery, for producing gods? The State can make you a god. You cannot make yourself a god. There are no gods on desert islands. It’s time to trust the State. It’s time to allow the State to engineer your metamorphosis. It’s time to become what you truly are … an authentic god.”
― Joe Dixon, The Liberty Wars: The Trump Time Bomb

“Looking round, with a sudden thought, from a terrace on which I rested for a while, I realised that there were no small houses to be seen. Apparently the single house, and possibly even the household, had vanished. Here and there among the greenery were palace-like buildings, but the house and the cottage, which form such characteristic features of our own English landscape, had disappeared. ‘Communism,’ said I to myself.”
― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine