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Max Eastman Quotes

Max Forrester Eastman was an American writer on literature, philosophy and society; a poet, and a prominent political activist. Moving to New York City for graduate school, Eastman became involved with liberal and radical circles in Greenwich Village. He supported socialism and became a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance, and an activist for a number of liberal and radical causes. For several years, he edited The Masses. With his sister Crystal Eastman, in 1917 he co-founded The Liberator, a radical magazine of politics and the arts.

In later life, however, Eastman changed his views, becoming highly critical of socialism and communism after his experiences during a nearly two-year stay in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, as well as later studies. He was influenced by the deadly rivalry between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, in which Trotsky was ultimately assassinated, as well as the mass killings committed during Stalin's Great Purge. Eastman became an advocate of free-market economics and anti-communism, while remaining an atheist. In 1955, he published Reflections on the Failure of Socialism. He published more frequently in National Review and other conservative journals in later life, but he always remained independent in his thinking; for instance, he publicly opposed United States involvement in the Vietnam War in the 1960s, earlier than most.

✵ 4. January 1883 – 25. March 1969
Max Eastman photo
Max Eastman: 15   quotes 0   likes

Famous Max Eastman Quotes

“A smile is the universal welcome.”

Max Eastman

Source: The Sense of Humor

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

Max Eastman

Source: Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955), p. 57

“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

Source: Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955), p. 29

“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

Source: Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955), p. 18

“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

Marx, Lenin and the Science of Revolution (1926), p.22

“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

Source: Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955), pp. 37-38

Max Eastman Quotes about people

“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

Source: Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955), p. 55

“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

Source: Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955), p. 45

“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

Attributed by internet sources to Enjoyment of Poetry: With Other Essays in Aesthetics (1939), but not confirmed.
Source: Enjoyment of Poetry With Anthology for Enjoyment of Poetry (1951), p. 233 https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/oV5emKH2uhcC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=status%20quo
Source: The quote appears to have been first published in the essay "The Slogan, 'Propaganda Has No Place in Art,' Is The Symptom Of A Decaying Culture" https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/WX3NyDFUC_MC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=eastman, Stage Magazine (1934).

Max Eastman Quotes

“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

Marxism: Is It Science? (1940)

Religion , Universe , Science

“The backers of Hitler in Germany made the same mistake about the Nazi party that the workers and soldiers in Petrograd made about the Bolshevik party. Each group believed that this new brutal, rabid, monolithic fighting gang, on achieving power, would promote, as had been promised, its enlightened interests.”

Max Eastman

Source: Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955), p. 110

Fight

“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

Source: Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955), p. 110

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

Max Eastman

Source: Stalin's Russia and the Crisis in Socialism (1940), p. 82

Hope

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

Max Eastman

Source: Stalin's Russia and the Crisis in Socialism (1940), p. 149

Evil

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