Olof Palme
8 quotes
Biography
"For us, democracy is a question of human dignity. This includes the political liberties, the right to freely express our views, the right to criticize and to influence opinion. It embraces the right to health and work, to education and social security."
"Apartheid cannot be reformed. It has to be eliminated."
"Human beings will find a balanced situation when they do good things not because God says it, but because they feel like doing them."
"They build their democratic institutions with pedantic conscientiousness."
"The bourgeoisie seemed to live in the illusion that an effort for peace presupposed an almost unreserved support for the American position. The hallmark of a balanced bourgeois critique seems to be that it should be heard as little as possible. Preferably be almost silent. That it is surrounded by so many reservations that it loses every meaning and that it is guaranteed not to affect any business."
"Yet, alongside Western weaknesses, there were also serious problems for the Soviet system, while the American position was less bleak, in both absolute and relative terms, than the successive electoral defeats of presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in presidential elections in 1976 and 1980 might suggest. Moreover, the failure of the Communists to benefit substantially from the changes in Portugal, Spain and Greece was matched by Communist weakness elsewhere in Western Europe. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, French President from 1974 to 1981, and Helmut Schmidt, German Chancellor from 1974 to 1982, combined to act as a very strong stabilising force and to relaunch the EEC project. Within the Socialist International, the so-called Socialist Triangle of Willy Brandt, Olof Palme, Swedish Prime Minister, and Bruno Kreisky, Austrian Chancellor, was dominant. In Italy, the Communist Party, the most powerful in Western Europe, adopted a ‘Euro-Communism’ that was opposed to Soviet direction. Enrico Berlinguer, who became Party Secretary in 1973, a key figure, was committed to the existing democratic system and pursued what was termed the ‘historic compromise’ with the established Christian Democrat-dominated political system. A pact was negotiated in 1976, with the Communist Party agreeing not to try to overthrow the Christian Democratic government. Euro-Communism was a term coined in 1975 by Western European Communist leaders keen to demonstrate their democratic credentials. More generally in Western Europe, the declining position of heavy industries was a challenge to the trade unions that were central to left-wing political parties, and notably to the Communists."
"For us democracy is a question of human dignity. And human dignity is political freedom."
"The rights of democracy are not reserved for a select group within society, they are the rights of all the people."