Max Eastman > Quotes

“A smile is the universal welcome.”
― Max Eastman, The Sense of Humor

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

“Living well is the best revenge.If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door.”
― Max Eastman, The Sense of Humor

“It seems obvious to me now – though I have been slow, I must say, in coming to the conclusion – that 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 by abolishing this institution. Strangely enough Marx was the first to see this. He is the one who informed us, looking backwards, that the evolution of private capitalism with its free market had been a precondition for the evolution of all our democratic freedoms. It never occurred to him, looking forward, that if this was so, these other freedoms might disappear with the abolition of the free market.”
― Max Eastman

“The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.”
― Max Eastman

“History is not an escalator.”
― Max Eastman

“Humor is the instinct for taking pain playfully.”
― Max Eastman

“I wonder how many revolutions will be required before grown-up people learn not to say to children, 'I had those same ideas when I was your age.”
― Max Eastman, Leon Trotsky: The Portrait of a Youth

“A wonderful generation of men and women was born to fulfill this revolution in Russia. You may be traveling in any remote part of that country, and you will see some quiet, strong, thoughtful face in your coach or omnibus—a middle-aged man with white, philosophic forehead and soft brown beard, or an elderly woman with sharply arching eyebrows and a stern motherliness about her mouth, or perhaps a middle-aged man, or a younger woman who is still sensuously beautiful, but carries herself as though she had walked up to a cannon—you will inquire, and you will find out that they are the “old party workers.” Reared in the tradition of the Terrorist movement, a stern and sublime heritage of martyr-faith, taught in infancy to love mankind, and to think without sentimentality, and to be masters of themselves, and to admit death into their company, they learned in youth a new thing—to think practically. And they were tempered in the fires of jail and exile. They became almost a noble order, a selected stock of men and women who could be relied upon to be heroic, like the Knights of the Round Table or the Samurai, but with the patents of their nobility in the future, not the past.”
― Max Eastman, The Young Trotsky

“The real treasurers of the language are and always have been the knowers of its immediate beauty.”
― Max Eastman, Journalism Versus Art