Eugene V. Debs Quotes

Capitalism carries in itself war, like clouds carry rain.

You believe you are dying for the fatherland—you die for some industrialist.

You think you are dying for your country; you die for the industrialists.

In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords ... to enlarge their domains, to increase their power, their prestige and their wealth they declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war. The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles…. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose.

For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it.

The motivation for war is simple. The U.S. government started the war with Iraq in order to make it easy for U.S. corporations to do business in other countries. They intend to use cheap labor in those countries, which will make Americans rich.

Capitalism is war; socialism is peace.

No worker has any business to enlist in the capitalist class war (World War I) or fight a capitalist class battle. It is our duty to enlist in our own war and fight our own battle.

Capitalists are no more capable of self sacrifice than a man is capable of lifting himself by his own bootstraps.

The bloody capitalists cannot conclude an honorable peace. They can conclude only a dishonorable peace, based upon a division of spoils.

I am on the anti-imperialist left. The Stalinist left? I wouldn't define it that way because of the pejoratives loaded around it; … If you are asking did I support the Soviet Union, yes I did. Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life. If there was a Soviet Union today, we would not be having this conversation about plunging into a new war in the Middle East, and the US would not be rampaging around the globe.

War is capitalism with the gloves off …

The “natural laws of economics” are in fact tools in the hands of the avaricious and the greedy for keeping down and oppressing the laboring classes.

The government of the United States doesn't want peace. It wants to exploit its system of exploitation, of pillage, of hegemony through war. It wants peace, but what's happening in Iraq? What happened in Lebanon? Palestine? What's happening? What's happened over the last hundred years in Latin America and in the world?

You show me a capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker.

At the Imperial Conference on December 1, it was decided to make war against England and the United States.

The guiding principle is not to manufacture the goods everyone needs, rather to earn profits for a few capitalists.

The most disastrous phenomenon of the current situation is the factor that imperialism is employing for its own ends all the powers of the proletariat, all of its institutions and weapons, which its fighting vanguard has created for its war of liberation.

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.

Bush, and Blair, and the prime minister of Japan, and Berlusconi, these people are criminals, and they are responsible for mass murder in the world, for the war, and for the occupation, through their support for Israel, and through their support for a globalized capitalist economic system, which is the biggest killer the world has ever known.

Lenin was the first to discover that capitalism 'inevitably' caused war; and he discovered this only when the First World War was already being fought. Of course he was right. Since every great state was capitalist in 1914.

I remember an article, I can't recall who by, it was after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which said that now the Wall was down, there could be no more class war. Only someone with money could ever say such a thing.

I'm not a communist, of course. But I do think that everything is down to economics. Capitalism doesn't change.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.