Tyranny
Totalitarian State
“An armed seizure of power by a highly organized minority party…will normally lead to the totalitarian state. ‘Totalitarian state’ is merely the modern name for tyranny.” ~Max Eastman
Max Eastman Quotes
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Socialism
Romantic Philosophy
“There is no intellectual question of more importance to the future of American culture than the question whether we are going to conduct our social efforts in the name of science, or are going to swallow down this romantic philosophy” ~Max Eastman
Dialectic
Hegelism
“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
Religion
Such a Religion as This
“The Marxian policy is to root out all warm and personal religions, and at the same time destroy wonder and a sense of the world’s mystery, by putting a cold and impersonal religion in their place… ~Max Eastman
Marxism
Dialectic Metaphysics IS Ideological
“It is impossible, once you have defined ideology as thinking which is unconscious of its motive, to let Marxism continue to hide its motive in an animistic philosophy of the universe…”
~Max Eastman
Religion
Animistic Thinking
“Animistic thinking consists in trying by some sort of hocus-pocus to transfer your own wishes into the external world, and so get them realized.” ~Max Eastman
Economics
Private Property
“The institution of private property is one of the main things that have given man that limited amount of free and equalness that Marx hoped to render infinite.” ~Max Eastman
Socialism
Resistance to Tyranny
“Almost everyone who cares earnestly about freedom is aroused against the Communists. But it is not only the Communists, it is in a more subtle way the Socialists who are blocking the efforts of the free world…”
~Max Eastman
Socialism
Socialist Hypothesis
“If the socialist hypothesis were valid in general, some tiny shred of the benefits promised by it would have appeared when the Russian capitalists were expropriated and production taken over by the state…” ~Max Eastman
Marxism
Front Organization
“It was Marx, not Lenin, who invented the technique of the “front organization,” the device of pretending to be a democrat in order to destroy democracy, the ruthless purging of dissident party members…”
~Max Eastman