Socialism
Fairy Tale
“We are still beguiled by this other fairy tale: that a group of liberal-minded reformers can take charge of the economy and approximate a free and equal society.” ~Max Eastman
Max Eastman Quotes
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Socialism
Animal Egoisms
“The crude animal egoisms of men and classes of men thus grab ideas and use them, not as heroic lights to action, but as blinds to hide inaction or actions that are too base.” ~Max Eastman
Marxism
Naive and Cloudy
“Dialectic Materialism, examined at its point of origin, turns out to be the rather naive, cloudy, unsuccessful and half-minded attempt of a matter-of-fact mind to escape from German metaphysics.” ~Max Eastman
Socialism
States of Passion
“The most persistent and most threatening enemy of the scientific attitude is the disposition of men to think what they want to think, to bend the results, and pervert its authority, to the support of their purposes and states of passion.” ~Max Eastman
Religion
Common Sense
“The ability to rest in doubt, to withhold belief where belief is not warranted by methodological investigation is indispensable to expert common sense and it is the part most difficult for amateurs to learn.” ~Max Eastman
Religion
Science and Magic
“He (the scientist) is an implacable enemy of the occult. He really wants to know; the magician wants not to know.” ~Max Eastman
Science
Valid Knowledge
“Science regards all valid knowledge as derived ultimately from experience, derived by the methods of observation, experiment, and rational calculation, and subject to the practical test of action.” ~Max Eastman
Socialism
Practical Thinking
“If Marx had understood the art of practical thinking, Das Kapital might have been as great a book as the Hegelian Marxists think it is.” ~Max Eastman
Marxism
Mix the Facts
Marx “learned, as all good classical philosophers do, to mix the facts and the animistic presuppositions so intricately that it takes a lifetime to divide them.” ~Max Eastman
Dialectic
The Changeless
“Science has always occupied itself with changes, and animism has survived for the most part as an assertion of the Changeless which lies behind and beyond them.” ~Max Eastman