Victor L. Berger

Victor L. Berger (February 28, 1860 – August 7, 1929) was an Austrian–American socialist politician and journalist who was a founding member of the Social Democratic Party of America and its successor, the Socialist Party of America.

Quotes

 * This country is divided into classes as much as any monarchial country. Therefore, the working class—the men and women who work either with their brains or their hands—must have a party of their own to take care of their interests of their own class.
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 * Political parties are simply the expression of economic interests.
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 * The working class has nothing to hope from either the Republican party or the Democratic party. It is true that the representatives of these parties may be, and very often are, very cultured and accomplished gentlemen. Most of them are honest. However, they represent the capitalistic system, and the more honest and consistent they are—the more loyal they are to their class.
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 * I would rather use a hundred years to bring about a new world, a better world, by evolution, with all the blessings of civilization, than bring it about by a bloody revolution, as they have in Russia, by shooting down about 30,000 men and women.
 * idem


 * This is the first instance in the history of the world that the oppressed class has virtually the same political basis as the ruling class.
 * Attributed in Victor L. Berger: Making Marx Respectable, The Wisconsin Magazine of History, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Summer, 1964), pp. 301-308, by Roderick Nash


 * It is foolish to expect results from riots and dynamite, from murderous attacks and conspiracies, in a country where we have the ballot, as long as the ballot has not been given a full and fair trial.
 * idem


 * According to my idea, we shall never reach the millenium. We shall never have any heaven on earth. We shall always have great problems to solve. But we shall have an infinitely higher civilization than we have now.
 * idem


 * The Socialists expect to keep all that is good or useful in the capitalist system and leave it as a heritage to the next generation. And the Socialists will destroy nothing that they can not replace by something better or more beneficial.
 * idem


 * After we have taken over the United States Steel Corporation, Mr. Gary, if he wants to keep his job, might possibly do so, but we would not pay him $800,000 a year.
 * idem


 * Socialism is the next phase of civilization, if civilization is to survive.
 * idem


 * Unless plutocracy can persuade the majority of the people to close up the public schools and make illiterates of the next generation, and unless it can also persuade them to give up the electoral franchise, plutocracy is doomed. So much is clear. And that is the reason why we Socialists can look with such equanimity and complacence into the future. The future belongs to some form of Socialism.
 * In Defense of Representative Government: Speech to Congress - October 17, 1919


 * It will depend on our rulers whether we shall have an orderly evolution, which I have always preached and propagated, or a violent revolution, which we Socialists have always tried to avoid.
 * In Defense of Representative Government: Speech to Congress - October 17, 1919


 * Like every new phase of civilization, Socialism thus far has received the attention only of the oppressed and the lowly. The opulent and the rich have no reason to wish for a change of the present system. They do not, as a rule, want to hear anything about it. Until of late, outside of the working class, only students of history, of political economy, and a few advanced thinkers have given any attention to the principles of Socialism. Most other persons have only a very vague idea even of its basis.
 * In Defense of Representative Government: Speech to Congress - October 17, 1919


 * And even that violent upheaval was only due to the fact that in Russia the autocracy was stupid, ignorant, and corrupt. In Russia the ruling class looked upon government and public trust as nothing but huge sources of profits and plunder. This is also a warning for other countries where the ruling class is ignorant, more or less stupid, and corrupt: where there is constant profiteering, based upon bribery, direct or indirect, by hiring ex-Cabinet members as "attorneys" for big corporations.
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 * It is true that interesting historical document, the Declaration of Independence, says that "all men are born free and equal." But that was not so, even at the time when the sentence was written. It is less so now.
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Quotes about

 * American Magazine declared in 1912 that he was "The sanest and most influential Socialist in this country."
 * Roderick Nash, Victor L. Berger: Making Marx Respectable, The Wisconsin Magazine of History, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Summer, 1964), pp. 301-308


 * Victor Luitpold Berger, the first member of the Socialist party ever to sit in a United States Congress, was a disappointment to those who imagined a man of his views to be a bearded, bomb-tossing anarchist haunting the bourgeois world. His life was a model of respectability. It included such unlikely vocations as punching cattle and high-school teaching. As a member of the Sixty-second Congress, 1911-1913, Berger peered at his colleagues in the House of Representatives from behind thin-rimmed spectacles with a bearing that was courteous and dignified to the point of stodginess. The end for Berger was equally respectable: instead of falling behind the barricades clutching the red flag of the proletariat, he was run over by a Milwaukee streetcar!
 * Roderick Nash, Victor L. Berger: Making Marx Respectable, The Wisconsin Magazine of History, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Summer, 1964), pp. 301-308


 * In Berger's analysis the old Russian order had refused to reform democratically. The result was violent revolution instead of peaceful evolution.
 * Roderick Nash, Victor L. Berger: Making Marx Respectable, The Wisconsin Magazine of History, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Summer, 1964), pp. 301-308
 * Note: The quote is referring to the Russian revolution.