Socialists

"Politics, the eternal mother of all human endeavors, has remained shackled to the economy and to the marketplace."

"Consider that human life is a miracle, that we are alive as a result of a miracle, and that nothing is more important than life."

"Let us consider the deep-rooted causes, the civilization of waste, the present civilization that is stealing time from human life and wasting it on pointless matters."

"Our biological duty is, above all, to respect life, promote it, take care of it, reproduce it and understand that WE are the species."

"It is possible to eliminate poverty from the planet. It is possible to create stability. It will be possible for future generations, if they begin to reason as a species and not just as individuals..."

"If our dreams are to come true, we will have to control ourselves or we will die. We will die because we are not capable of being at the level of the civilization that we have been developing with our efforts. That is our dilemma. We should not spend our time merely correcting the consequences."

"How many millions of dollars have they taken from our pockets deliberately creating junk so that people will buy and buy and buy?...In our culture, we act as if nothing had happened. Instead of us controlling globalization, it controls us."

"Turning to a useful neo-Keynesianism on a global scale in order to abolish the world’s most flagrant embarrassments would be a thousand times more profitable than making war."

"The greed that pushed us to domesticate science and transform technology — is paradoxically pushing us over the edge into a shadowy abyss, towards an unknown fate, an era without history, and we are left without eyes to see or the collective intelligence to continue to colonize and transform ourselves."

"Today, the world is incapable of establishing global regulations for the planet, due to the failure of lofty global politics, which meddles with everything."

"Medical research on all manner of diseases, which has made huge advances and is a blessing that promises longer life, receives barely a fifth of what is budgeted for the military. That process, from which we cannot escape, perpetuates hatred, fanaticism and distrust, fuels new wars and wastes fortunes."

"We must achieve a broad planetary consensus to unleash solidarity among the most oppressed and to punish and tax waste and speculation by mobilizing the large economies not to produce disposable goods, but rather useful goods without planned obsolescence or excess, which would help the world’s poorest peoples. Useful goods could stand against world poverty."

"What is the big picture of which we speak? It is the system of global life on Earth, including human life, with all the fragile balances that make it impossible for us to continue as we are."

"We have finally learned that intelligence must be at the helm, guiding the ship to port."

"The globalized economy has no other driving force except that of the private interests of the very few, and each nation State seeks only to maintain its own stability."

"The fact is that we tend to cultivate feudal anachronisms, spoiled affectations and hierarchical distinctions that undermine the best feature of republics — the fact that no one is better than anyone else. The interaction of those factors and others keeps us living in prehistory, and today it is impossible to renounce war when politics fails. Thus, economies are strangled and resources wasted."

"That NATO advance makes no sense. It is going to lead us again to a division of the world."

"Truly productive capitalism is a prisoner of the banks, which are at the summit of global power."

"The world is clamoring for global regulations that respect scientific achievements, which abound, but it is not science that governs the world."

"Every minute in the life of our planet, we spend $2 million on military budgets around the world — $2 million a minute."

"With talent and collective work, with science, step by step humankind can make deserts green; humankind can bring agriculture to the seas; humankind can develop agriculture that lives with salt water."

"Liberalism has the idea that democracy is its invention, that liberalism had to come about for democracy to exist... Democracy is old, very old; it is an attitude of man… Democracy is an imminent attitude, but one that has always been in crisis with authoritarianism. So democracy can never be considered to be finished or perfect, the end of history does not exist, historical steps exist. Maybe today conditions are being created--thanks to digital mass-communication—that are going to foreshadow a kind of democracy that today we cannot imagine."

"We've been talking all afternoon about sustainable development. To get the masses out of poverty. But what are we thinking? Do we want the model of development and consumption of the rich countries? I ask you now: what would happen to this planet if Indians would have the same proportion of cars per household than Germans? How much oxygen would we have left? Does this planet have enough resources so seven or eight billion can have the same level of consumption and waste that today is seen in rich societies? It is this level of hyper-consumption that is harming our planet. (Speech at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, Rio+20, June 2012)"

"Bourgeois democracy: I defend it and I criticise it. What do I criticise? That it promises a degree of equality that it does not fulfill in practice.. If democracy has to represent the majority, as a symbol I understand that those who have the highest responsibilities should live as the majority does, not the minority. We have become feudal and the monarchy has come back in a different form.Bold text Presidents—the red carpet, those who play cornets, vassals on the bridge, all this paraphernalia which is not republican, because republics came into the world to reaffirm this: that men are basically equal."

"This is why I say, in my humble way of thinking, that the problem we are facing is political. The old thinkers. Epicurus, Seneca and even the Aymara put it this way, a poor person is not someone who has little but one who needs infinitely more, and more and more.” This is a cultural issue."

"We have sacrificed the old immaterial Gods and now we are occupying the temple of the market god. This god organizes our economy, our politics, our habits, our lives and even provides us with rates and credit cards and gives us the appearance of happiness."

"We have to figure out how to recycle more and how to counter global warming. What are the limits of each human task? How many years ago did they tell us in Kyoto about certain facts linked to climate change?"

"Anyone who looks at a map to say that Venezuela could be a threat has to be quite mad. Venezuelans have a marvelous Constitution – the most audacious in all of Latin America."

"We are a republican voice for the world – a proclamation that has been interpreted to signpost a “possible future, a path, however modest, to take for the common good with politics as its ethical base and honesty as its guiding light."

"Locked up, I almost went mad... Now I'm a prisoner of my own freedom to think and decide as I wish. I cultivate that freedom and fight for it. I may make mistakes, some huge, but one of my few virtues is I say what I think... I re-read Plato in search of keys to understand what is going on, for nothing is completely new... Politics, which should rule human relations, has succumbed to economics and become a mere administrator... My definition of poverty is the one we owe to Seneca: It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, who is poor... I have the aggressive courage to speak out. It's not done in the modern world, where people conceal and disguise their feelings. Maybe that's why I get people's attention... This [marijuana] law is a trial. It doesn't mean we have the final answer....The only thing I'm sure of is that the policy of combating drugs which has been enforced for decades is a crashing failure.... I think recognition of gay marriage, abortion and the law on marijuana all represent progress. But they will really achieve something when there is less of a gap between the poor, the destitute and the very rich... You know what getting old means? No longer wanting to leave home."

"Going from one adventure to another, politics achieves little more than perpetuating itself, and as such it delegates its power and spends its time bewildered, fighting for the Government. Out of control, human history marches forward, buying and selling everything and innovating in order to negotiate what is, in a way, non-negotiable..."

"I am greatly anguished by the future that I will not see, and to which I have committed myself. Yes, it is possible to have a world with better humankind, but perhaps today the main task is to save life..."

"If the power of humankind is focused on what is essential, it is infinite."

"So I salute the efforts and agreements being made. And I will adhere to them, as a ruler. I know some things I’m saying are not easy to digest. But we must realize that the water crisis and the aggression to the environment is not the cause. The cause is the model of civilization that we have created. And the thing we have to re-examine is our way of life."

"The average city dweller wanders between financial institutions and tedious office routines, sometimes moderated by air conditioning. He often dreams about vacations and freedom. He dreams about having the ability to pay his bills until one day his heart stops and he is gone. Other such soldiers will fall prey to the jaws of the marketplace."

"The philosophy of my heart is libertarian. I don’t like the idea of the exploitation of man by man. I believe that one day human civilization will overcome this somehow. But that is not to say that I favour the state as the owner of everything, no, no, no. I can’t conceive of that. I lean a lot towards self-management, with all of the risks it entails for any important institution. It is not exactly the state that should manage things, it’s the people that have to manage them."

"I’m not talking about returning to the days of the caveman, or erecting a “monument to backwardness.” But we cannot continue like this, indefinitely, being ruled by the market, on the contrary, we have to rule over the market."

"Today, man does not govern the forces he has unleashed, but rather, it is these forces that govern man; and life. Because we do not come into this planet simply to develop, just like that, indiscriminately. We come into this planet to be happy. Because life is short and it slips away from us. And no material belonging is worth as much as life, and this is fundamental.But if life is going to slip through my fingers, working and over-working in order to be able to consume more, and the consumer society is the engine-because ultimately, if consumption is paralyzed, the economy stops, and if you stop economy, the ghost of stagnation appears for each one of us, but it is this hyper-consumption that is harming the planet. And this hyper-consumption needs to be generated, making things that have a short useful life, in order to sell a lot. Thus, a light bulb cannot last longer than 1000 hours. But there are light bulbs that last 100,000 hours! But these cannot be manufactured, because the problem is the market, because we have to work and we have to sustain a civilization of “use and discard”, and so, we are trapped in a vicious cycle. These are problems of a political nature, which are showing us that it’s time to start fighting for a different culture."

"What are we thinking?...What would happen to this planet if Indians would have the same proportion of cars per household [as] Germans? How much oxygen would we have left? Does this planet have enough resources so... eight billion can have the same level of consumption & waste that today is seen in rich societies? It is this level of hyper-consumption that is harming our planet... Are we ruling over globalization or is globalization ruling over us? Is it possible to speak of solidarity and of “being all together” in an economy based on ruthless competition? How far does our fraternity go? I am not saying any of to undermine the importance of this event. On the contrary, the challenge ahead of us is of a colossal magnitude and the great crisis is not an ecological crisis, but rather a political one."

"I'm called 'the poorest president', but I don't feel poor. Poor people are those who only work to try to keep an expensive lifestyle, and always want more and more. This is a matter of freedom. If you don't have many possessions then you don't need to work all your life like a slave to sustain them, and therefore you have more time for yourself."

"That (Guantanamo Bay detention camp) isn’t a prison. It’s a kidnapping den, because a prison entails subjection to some system of law, the presence of some sort of prosecutor, the decision of some judge — whomever that may be — and a minimal point of reference from a judicial point of view. Guantánamo has nothing."

"The transformations in the Polish economy continue. We are slowly approaching the completion of the privatisation of enterprises and banks. We have built a securities and financial instruments market from scratch. The private sector, employing almost 70 per cent of the entire working population, is growing dynamically."

"I've gotten to know this man well over the years. He is a leader, he understands that people need to lead their country towards peace and freedom and prosperity. And President Kwasniewski is doing just that. He's making a mark on the continent of Europe through his leadership. He stands strong. In every conversation I've had with him, he has a deep love for the Polish people. He expresses his desire for close relations, because he understands close relations between our countries is in the people's interest. And Mr. President, I'm so glad you're back. I appreciate your friendship, I appreciate your strength."

"Ex-communists frequently did well out of the ‘transition to the market’. This was a phenomenon common to several states in the region but not in Poland, the Czech Republic or the abolished German Democratic Republic, where communists were flung out of positions of influence. Nearly everywhere the communist parties adopted fresh names, new leaders and a programme of ideas close to social-democracy rather than communism. This was usually not enough to earn them popular trust. But they were not disgraced in elections and in 1995 the ex-communist Alexander Kwasniewski won the Polish presidency and served two full terms. This had been barely imaginable in the heady years of Solidarity’s supremacy. Yet capitalism had not been kind to many people in Poland and elsewhere in the 1990s. Mass unemployment, shoddy welfare facilities and a widening of the gap between rich and poor gave communists a second chance in politics. They had to adjust their appeal by wrapping themselves in the national flag, throwing Marxism to the winds and identifying themselves with the needs of downtrodden electors. Electoral victory did not come easily or often. Kwasniewski had done better than the candidates put up by communist parties in western Europe."

"We have become aware of the responsibility for our attitude towards the dark pages in our history. We have understood that bad service is done to the nation by those who are impelling to renounce that past. Such attitude leads to a moral self-destruction."

"Poland really started to change in 1989. Since then, we have achieved our main goals: we are in the European Union, we are in NATO, and we finally have democracy after almost fifty years of communist rule. We have a full-fledged free-market economy."

"Six years ago, I didn’t hope, I didn’t dream that in 1995 I would win the presidential election. But the situation in Poland changed very fast, and became totally unpredictable. Poland is going on this democratic way faster than we thought before."

"Ukraine is not an ideal country, nor will it be one for a long time to come. But we have the opportunity to introduce it to our standards. If we don't do that, Kiev will follow the Russian and the Belarusian model. Ukraine was strongly under Russia's influence for centuries, and its people experienced a very brutal form of communism."

"In the old Belarusian society, women’s stories—however important—were silenced. The crucial change we observe now is that women are not only organising to survive but they are leading the fight. That is indeed incredibly inspirational!"

"I understand that if someone asks me to be part of some project it’s not only because I’m so good, it’s also because I am Kwasniewski and I am a former president of Poland. And this is all inter-connected. No-names are a nobody."