“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

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "An honest, bold, loyal, and within its limits extremely highbrow attempt to produce through common ownership a society …" by Max Eastman?
Max Eastman photo
Max Eastman15
American activist 1883–1969

Related quotes

Peter F. Drucker photo

“[T]he Western European democracies... will be forced into totalitarianism unless they produce a noneconomic society striving for the freedom and equality of the individual.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The End of Economic Man (1939), p. 242

Antonie Pannekoek photo

“Public ownership is a middle-class program of a modernized and disguised form of capitalism. Common ownership by the producers can be the only goal of the working class.”

Antonie Pannekoek (1873–1960) Dutch astronomer and Marxist theorist

Section 1.2
Workers Councils (1947)

Brigham Young photo

“Honest hearts produce honest actions.”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Discourses of Brigham Young, p. 232
Attributed

Hermann Rauschning photo

“Nothing is more mistaken than to talk of a ‘totalitarian State’ or a “classless” society within the realm of a nihilist revolution.”

Hermann Rauschning (1887–1982) German politician

Source: The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West (1939), p. 26
Context: Nothing is more mistaken than to talk of a ‘totalitarian State’ or a “classless” society within the realm of a nihilist revolution. In the place of these there is a machinery of absolute dominion, recognizing independence in no sphere at all, not even in the private life of the individual; and the totalitarian collectivity of the Volksgemeinachaft, the ‘national community,’ an euphemism for an atomized, structureless nation.

Thomas Mann photo

“Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.”

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate

Source: Death in Venice and Other Tales

Thomas Jefferson photo

“Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add "within the limits of the law" because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Isaac H. Tiffany (4 April 1819)
1810s

“Eugenics is not just a tool of totalitarianism. Eugenics, as it was conceived, could not be anything but totalitarian as it desired to control all aspects of society. Hitler’s “National Socialist” (Nationalsozialist) form of government was amongst the first to put the full force of its government to conduct compulsory health initiatives. It is by no coincidence that the Dachau concentration camp used its slave-labor to run the largest organic produce farm of the era.”

A.E. Samaan

Source: H.H. LAUGHLIN: American Scientist. American Progressive. Nazi Collaborator.

“We have to stop allowing economics to be used as a trump card. Capitalism is like math. It is amoral. It is good at producing wealth; it's bad at distributing wealth. Unless it operates within a moral framework it will produce an unjust society.”

Charley Reese (1937–2013) American journalist

Is Economics All There Is?, July 18, 2003

Paul Karl Feyerabend photo

“In a war a totalitarian state has a free hand.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Science in a Free Society

Source: Science in a Free Society (1978), p. 87.

Karl Marx photo

“What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Section 1, paragraph 53, lines 11-13.
The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

Related topics