Max Eastman Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails.
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An honest, bold, loyal, and within its limits extremely highbrow attempt to produce through common ownership a society of the Free and Equal, produced a tyrant and a totalitarian state;…
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It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor.
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People who demand neutrality in any situation are usually not neutral but in favor of the status quo.
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A smile is the universal welcome.
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Laughter is, after speech, the chief thing that holds society together.
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A joke is not a thing but a process, a trick you play on the listener's mind. You start him off toward a plausible goal, and then by a sudden twist you land him nowhere at all or just where he didn't expect to go.
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Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.
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More goods and fewer people is the slogan I should like to see carried at the head of humanity's march into the future.
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Emotion is the surest arbiter of a poetic choice, and it is the priest of all supreme unions in the mind.
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A liberal mind is a mind that is able to imagine itself believing anything.
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Robert Benchley has a style that is weak and lies down frequently to rest.
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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.
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A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke.
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It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
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The worst enemy of human hope is not brute facts, but men of brains who will not face them.
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Humor is the instinct for taking pain playfully.
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The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.
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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.
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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.