Fellow Traveler

A fellow traveler (US English) or fellow traveller (Commonwealth English) is a person who sympathizes with the beliefs of an organization or cooperates in its activities without maintaining formal membership in that particular group. In the early Soviet Union the approximate term was used without negative connotation to describe writers and artists sympathetic to the goals of the Russian Revolution who declined to join the Communist Party. The English-language phrase came into vogue in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s as a pejorative term for a sympathizer of Communism or particular Communist states, who was nonetheless not a "card-carrying member" of a Communist party.

Famous quotes containing the words fellow traveler, fellow and/or traveler:

    The literary “fellow travelers” of the Revolution.
    Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)

    That ever this fellow should have fewer words than a parrot, and yet the son of a woman!
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    The traveler to the United States will do well ... to prepare himself for the class-consciousness of the natives. This differs from the already familiar English version in being more extreme and based more firmly on the conviction that the class to which the speaker belongs is inherently superior to all others.
    John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)