Max Eastman quotes

Max Eastman was an American writer, poet, and political activist known for his work in literature and social criticism. An influential figure in both the socialist and later anti-communist movements, his writings covered topics from poetry to politics. He became a prominent intellectual voice, advocating for free expression and critical thinking throughout his career. Here are 28 of his quotes:

I still think the worst enemy of human hope is not brute facts, but men of brains who will not face them.

Max Eastman

A smile is the universal welcome.

Max Eastman

Hegelism is like a mental disease-you cannot know what it is until you get it, and then you can't know because you've got it.

Max Eastman

People who demand neutrality in any situation are usually not neutral but in favor of the status quo.

Max Eastman

Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails.

Max Eastman

Libertarians used to tell us that ‘the love of freedom is the strongest of political motives,' but recent events have taught us the extravagance of this opinion. The ‘herd-instinct' and the yearning for paternal authority are often as strong. Indeed the tendency of men to gang up under a leader and submit to his will is of all political traits the best attested by history. It has been so shockingly exemplified in modem times that only a somnambulist could ignore it in trying to build, or defend, a free society. His first concern should be to make sure that no one gang or group-neither the proletariat, nor the capitalists, nor the landowners, no the bankers, nor the army, nor the church, nor the government itself-shall have exclusive power.

Max Eastman

A false and undeliberated conception of what man is lies at the bottom, I think, of the whole bubble-castle of socialist theory. Although few seem to realize it, Marxism rests on the romantic notion of Rousseau that nature endows men with the qualities necessary to be a free, equal, fraternal, family-like living together, and our sole problem is to fix up the external conditions. All Marx did about this with his dialectical philosophy was to change the tenses in the romance: Nature will endow men with the qualities as soon as the conditions are fixed up.

Max Eastman

Marxists profess to reject religion in favor of science, but they cherish a belief that the external universe is evolving with reliable, if not divine, necessity in exactly the direction in which they want to go.

Max Eastman

It was natural that idealistic people who had ceased to believe in heaven should think up some bright hope for humanity on earth. That, I think, more than any objection to "capitalism", accounts for the spread of the socialist dream, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries.

Max Eastman

An honest, bold, loyal, and within its limits extremely highbrow attempt to produce through common ownership a society of the Free and Equal, produced a tyrant and a totalitarian state;...

Max Eastman

Stalinism is worse than fascism, more ruthless, barbarous, unjust, immoral, anti-democratic, unredeemed by any hope or scruple, ... better described as superfascist.

Max Eastman

Stalinism, as we have seen, contains all of the evils of Nazism and Fascism, most of them in extremer form.

Max Eastman

I omit from consideration here the fact that people who demand neutrality in any situation are usually not neutral, but in favor of the status quo.

Max Eastman

An armed seizure of power by a highly organized minority party, whether in the name of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the Glory of Rome, the Supremacy of the Nordics, or any other slogan that may be invented, and no matter how ingeniously integrated with the masses of the population, will normally lead to the totalitarian state. 'Totalitarian state' is merely the modern name for tyranny.

Max Eastman

More goods and fewer people is the slogan I should like to see carried at the head of humanity's march into the future.

Max Eastman

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

Max Eastman

It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor.

Max Eastman

A joke is not a thing but a process, a trick you play on the listener's mind. You start him off toward a plausible goal, and then by a sudden twist you land him nowhere at all or just where he didn't expect to go.

Max Eastman

A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke.

Max Eastman

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Max Eastman

The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.

Max Eastman

Laughter is, after speech, the chief thing that holds society together.

Max Eastman