"It is too obvious, too easily demonstrable that fascism and communism are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory - that both are variants of statism, based on the collectivist principle that man is the rightless slave of the state - that both are socialistic, in theory, in practice, and in the explicit statements of their leaders - that under both systems, the poor are enslaved and the rich are expropriated in favor of a ruling clique - that fascism is not the product of the political "right," but of the "left" - that the basic issue is not "rich versus poor," but man versus the state, or: individual rights versus totalitarian government - which means: capitalism versus socialism."
React to this quote
More by Leonard Peikoff
See allResonant Thoughts
"All of which goes to show that the State represents all the autocratic, arbitrary, coercive, belligerent forces within a social group, it is a sort of complexus of everything most distasteful to the m…"
"Attribution theory concerns the process by which an individual interprets events "as being caused by particular parts of the relatively stable environment" . Consideration of attribution theory is rel…"
Explore Further
Related Quotes
"We Anglophones tend to use the words nation and state more or less interchangeably, but when one nation is …"
— Brian Reynolds Myers"It should be remembered, as an axiom of eternal truth in politics, that whatever power in any government is…"
— Thomas Jefferson"Neither. I did not bring my crown, and the last thing I would want to do is get into politics."
— Gloria Estefan"Elijah Cummings for Congress"
— Elijah Cummings"The young world is giving up any interest in their political system. They have decided that it is absolutel…"
— Buckminster Fuller"If I give you a forty five percent chance at lethal injection, a fifty percent chance at the electric chair…"
— Michael Badnarik
Related Thinkers
Related Topics
Deep Dives
- Baruch Spinoza on politics
- Thomas Carlyle on politics
- Aristotle on politics
- Immanuel Kant on politics
- Michel de Montaigne on politics
- Friedrich Nietzsche on life
- Friedrich Nietzsche on truth
- Friedrich Nietzsche on philosophy
- Friedrich Nietzsche on time
- Friedrich Nietzsche on knowledge
- knowledge & Beauty
- knowledge & Change