Frases de Max Eastman
Max Eastman
Data de nascimento: 4. Janeiro 1883
Data de falecimento: 25. Março 1969
Max Forrester Eastman foi um escritor, poeta e proeminente socialista americano. Por muitos anos, foi patrono do movimento cultural Renascimento do Harlem e defendeu diversas causas liberais e radicais. Em 1917, com sua irmã Cristal Eastman, ele co-fundou a revista radical The Liberator. Posteriormente, nos anos 1920, seus pontos de vista mudaram, e ele se tornou um defensor da economia de mercado, anticomunista e, por algum tempo, macartista, mantendo-se, todavia ateu, e pensador independente.
Citações Max Eastman
„A smile is the universal welcome.“
— Max Eastman, The Sense of Humor
„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
pp. 37-38
„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
p. 29
„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
p. 110
„A liberal mind is a mind that is able to imagine itself believing anything.“
— Max Eastman
The Masses (September 1917)
„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
p. 18
