No society has succeeded in abolishing the distinction between ruler and ruled.. to be a ruler gives one special status and, usually, special privileges. During the Communist era, important officials in the Soviet Union had access to special shops selling delicacies unavailable to ordinary citizens; before China allowed capitalist enterprises in its economy, travelling by car was a luxury limited to tourists and those high in the party hierarchy Throughout the 'communist' nations, the abolition of the old ruling class was followed by the rise of a new class of party bosses and well-placed bureaucrats, whose behaviour and life-style came more and more to resemble that of their much-denounced predecessors. In the end, nobody believed in the system any more. That, couple with its inability to match the productivity of the less bureaucratically controlled, more egoistically driven capitalist economies, led to its downfall. Peter Singer
Some Similar Quotes
  1. Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war. - Norman Mailer

  2. It is easy to be conspicuously 'compassionate' if others are being forced to pay the cost. - Murray N. Rothbard

  3. If you can convince people that freedom is injustice, they will then believe that slavery is freedom. - Stefan Molyneux

  4. The world, viewed philosophically, remains a series of slave camps, where citizens — tax livestock — labor under the chains of illusion in the service of their masters. - Stefan Molyneux

  5. Communism is the final logic of the dehumanization of man. - Fulton J. Sheen

More Quotes By Peter Singer
  1. Were we incapable of empathy — of putting ourselves in the position of others and seeing that their suffering is like our own — then ethical reasoning would lead nowhere. If emotion without reason is blind, then reason without emotion is impotent.

  2. In an earlier stage of our development most human groups held to a tribal ethic. Members of the tribe were protected, but people of other tribes could be robbed or killed as one pleased. Gradually the circle of protection expanded, but as recently as 150...

  3. What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.

  4. Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.

  5. To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of...

Related Topics