“When one pays a visit it is for the purpose of wasting other people's time, not one's own.”
“Socialism proposes no adequate substitute for the motive of enlightened selfishness that to-day is at the basis of all human labor and effort, enterprise and new activity.”
“Socialism can only arrive by bicycle.”
“I only go out to get me a fresh appetite for being alone.”
“Great Socialist statesmen aren't made, they're still-born.”
“Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.”
“A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.”
“You're looking exceptionally ugly tonight, Madam, is it because we have company?”
“To make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great thing.”
“We are persons of quality, I assure you, and women of fashion, and come to see and to be seen.”
“A successful social technique consists perhaps in finding unobjectionable means for individual self-assertion.”
“Men of genius are often dull and inert in society; as the blazing meteor, when it descends to earth, is only a stone.”
“I pass the test that says a man who isn't a socialist at 20 has no heart, and a man who is a socialist at 40 has no head.”
“We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.”
“Real socialism is inside man. It wasn't born with Marx. It was in the communes of Italy in the Middle Ages. You can't say it is finished.”
“It is certainly safe, in view of the movement to the right of intellectuals and political thinkers, to pronounce the brain death of socialism.”
“What men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter, which lie close together to keep each other warm.”
“One is a socialist because one used to be one, no longer going to demonstrations, attending meetings, sending in one's dues, in short, without paying.”
“Socialists make the mistake of confusing individual worth with success. They believe you cannot allow people to succeed in case those who fail feel worthless.”
“If Socialism can only be realized when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see Socialism for at least five hundred years.”
“Rascals are always sociable -- more's the pity! and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others company.”
“Lions, wolves, and vultures don't live together in herds, droves or flocks. Of all animals of prey, man is the only sociable one. Every one of us preys upon his neighbor, and yet we herd together.”
“By concentrating on what is good in people, by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice, and by asking them to put their faith in the future, socialists put themselves at a severe disadvantage.”
“The only hope of socialism resides in those who have already brought about in themselves, as far as is possible in the society of today, that union between manual and intellectual labor which characterizes the society we are aiming at.”
“It wasn't idealism that made me, from the beginning, want a more secure and rational society. It was an intellectual judgment, to which I still hold. When I was young its name was socialism. We can be deflected by names. But the need was absolute, and is still absolute.”
“People nowadays like to be together not in the old-fashioned way of, say, mingling on the piazza of an Italian Renaissance city, but, instead, huddled together in traffic jams, bus queues, on escalators and so on. It's a new kind of togetherness which may seem totally alien, but it's the togetherness of modern technology.”
“This socialism will develop in all its phases until it reaches its own extremes and absurdities. Then once again a cry of denial will break from the titanic chest of the revolutionary minority and again a mortal struggle will begin, in which socialism will play the role of contemporary conservatism and will be overwhelmed in the subsequent revolution, as yet unknown to us.”