Stephen Harper Quotes

We cannot separate politics from economics.

Treaties or international covenants which provide human rights to food, clothing, housing, and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, or old age would transform the United States into a completely socialistic state.

For the past several years the United Nations has proclaimed Canada to be "The Best Place In The World To Live." But if you value individual and economic liberty, you are not likely to agree…What is it about Canada that the UN sees as especially praiseworthy and, by implication, the model to be emulated by other regimes? Could it be high taxation, centralized power, wealth redistribution between regions, and social engineering?

The way to get elected was to keep the market economy humming while cushioning people against its inevitable risks through ever more lavish social programs.

We can find our voice in the world again: a voice that is commensurate with the fifth-biggest economy on Earth.

I think the difference the Jimmy Carter presidency and the Obama regime is navet and maliciousness. I think this is purposeful maliciousness. That's why what you're seeing now in this administration. I don't think they care for this country. And I think they're trying to make it into some kind of third-world socialistic cesspool. I think they are willing to get in bed with any dictator or despotic ruler that they see.

Canada appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status.

Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State's honey and avoiding the sting?

Those in power are blind devotees to private enterprise. They accept that degree of socialism implicit in the vast subsidies to the military-industrial-complex, but not that type of socialism which maintains public projects for the disemployed and the unemployed alike.

But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.

Along this road of spending, the government either takes over, which is Socialism, or dictates institutional and economic life, which is Fascism.

We can just as little afford to follow the doctrinaires of an extreme individualism as the doctrinaires of an extreme socialism.

Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against "freedom of print," it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory.

Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it.

I don''t know if I like communism, and I don''t know if I like socialism. But I know that the Breakfast for Children Program feeds my kids. And if you put your hands on that Breakfast for Children Program . . .

Socialism starts when government creates a problem, and then government steps in to solve the problem.

If socialists mean that under extraordinary circumstances, for urgent cases, the State should set aside some resources to assist certain unfortunate people, to help them adjust to changing conditions, we will, of course, agree. This is done now; we desire that it be done better. There is however, a point on this road that must not be passed; it is the point where governmental foresight would step in to replace individual foresight and thus destroy it.

The next Tory leader would have to unify his party and ensure that Britain stood tall in the world.

The welfare state is institutionalized crime - 'organized plunder,' as the French economist Frederic Bastiat called it. It systematizes what is intrinsically wrong: forcing some people to support others. The Democrats favor the indefinite expansion of the welfare state, perpetually increasing the ratio of force to freedom in society.

Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?

The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of 'liberalism,' they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.

War has all the characteristics of socialism most conservatives hate: Centralized power, state planning, false rationalism, restricted liberties, foolish optimism about intended results, and blindness to unintended secondary results.

There is no difference in principle, ... between the economic philosophy of Nazism, socialism, communism, and fascism and that of the American welfare state and regulated economy.

Building great public schools and universities, a strong health care system, including keeping the Affordable Care Act, and then an economy that works well for people so that when they put in a hard day's work, they can support themselves and their family members. Those are the fundamentals that have distinguished America from other nations in the world.

To a certain extent I don't see any real need for socialism in the United States immediately, but things change and it may be that there will come a need for partial changes in our economy.