Collectivism Quotes – Reflections on Community

"A society with too few independent thinkers is vulnerable to control by disturbed and opportunistic leaders. A society which wants to create and maintain a free and democratic social system must create responsible independence of thought among its young."

John Dewey

"There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism - by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide."

Ayn Rand

"A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort ... is not strictly speaking a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang violence."

Ayn Rand

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."

Mark Twain

"A Libertarian society of unfettered individualism spreads its benefits to virtually everyone - not just those who have the resources to seize political power."

Harry Browne

"In his important social psychological experiments with students, Asch found out in simple tests that there was a yielding toward an ERRING MAJORITY opinion in more than a third of his test persons, and 75 percent of subjects experimented upon agreed with the majority in varying degrees. In many persons the weight of authority is more important than the quality of the authority."

Joost A.M. Meerloo

"In order to be an immaculate member of a flock of sheep, one must above all be a sheep oneself."

Albert Einstein

"You can protect a society, you can protect an economy, and you can even protect personal relationships to death."

Prof. Ferdinand Kirchhof

"Fascism, Nazism, Communism and Socialism are only superficial variations of the same monstrous theme—collectivism."

Ayn Rand

"Delusion is a self-contained value system that leads to a loss of rationality because it blocks open and critical thinking. When delusion arises in a community, irrational beliefs are amplified in the communal experience, reaching a fever pitch in moments of ecstasy that give individuals a feeling of happiness and power.

Mass delusion can have a neurotic and a psychotic component. Neurosis is the struggle between inner and outer reality. It is designed to win, otherwise it succumbs to panic. Psychosis is a closed value system in which the affected person feels completely secure. They are not in conflict with the reality of the outside world, but live in their own value system, which they perceive as real. A closed system defends its autonomy by developing a self-contained logic and deriving norms from it that must be accepted without question.

People who find themselves in a closed system become blind to reality and, when their irrational forces are unleashed, easily slip into dangerous delusion."

Hermann Broch

"The similarity is astonishing, what can be collectively enforced in the name of ‘the good of the people’, formerly under socialism and now under capitalism, in such a small circle! I don't even want to say it out loud, but a little devil on my shoulder whispers almost mischievously in my ear – ‘Welcome back to the GDR’."

Katarina Witt

"I don’t want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers."

John D. Rockefeller

"Being a socialist means subordinating the self to the collective, sacrificing one's personality for the greater good. Socialism, in its deepest sense, is service. It is renunciation for the individual and demand for the whole."

Joseph Goebbels

"The purpose of commercial [media] is to induce mass sales. For mass sales there must be a mass norm … By suppressing the individual, the unique, the industry … assures itself a standard product for mass consumption."

John Whiting

"I, on the other hand, would explicitly call for social disadvantages at this point for all those who voluntarily forego vaccination. May the entire republic point the finger at them."

Nikolaus Blome

"Mass formation is, in essence, a kind of group hypnosis that destroys individual's ethical self-awareness and robs them of their ability to think critically."

Mattias Desmet

"Collectivism and freedom are mortal enemies. Only one will survive"

G. Edward Griffin

"Collectivists would have you believe that individualism is merely another word for selfishness, because individualists oppose welfare and other forms of coercive redistribution of wealth, but just the opposite is true. Individualists advocate true charity, which is the voluntary giving of their own money, while collectivists advocate the coercive giving of other people's money; which, of course, is why it is so popular."

G. Edward Griffin