Max Eastman Quotes

20 Sourced Quotes

The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.

Max Eastman
Emotion is the surest arbiter of a poetic choice, and it is the priest of all supreme unions in the mind

Max Eastman
A liberal mind is a mind that is able to imagine itself believing anything.

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

Max Eastman
I don't know why it is we are in such a hurry to get up when we fall down. You might think we would lie there and rest for a while.

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

Max Eastman
The real guarantee of freedom is an equilibrium of social forces in conflict, not the triumph of any one force. In trying to build, or defend, a free society, our first concern should be to make sure that no one gang or group - neither the proletariat, nor the capitalists, nor the landowners, nor the bankers, nor the army, nor the church, nor the state itself - shall have unlimited power.

Max Eastman
Humor is a kind of emotional chaos told about calmly and quietly in retrospect.There is always a laugh in the utterly familiar.

Max Eastman
There is something self-defeating in the too-conscious pursuit of pleasure.

Max Eastman
There is truth in the high opinion that in so far as a man conforms, he ceases to exist.

Max Eastman
The worst enemy of human hope is not brute facts, but men of brains who will not face them.

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
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
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
There is a persistent difference of opinion about puns, some finding them cottony in the mouth, and others doting on the taste of them.

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

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
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