MAX EASTMAN QUOTATIONS
I began life, to go back to the very pinpoint of commencement, as a gloom in a minister�s family. If my mother had known what I know, I would never have been born. Nothing more inopportune than that abrupt damning of her blood-tides in the spring of 1882, which gave notice of my separate and impetuous plasma, could have been invented by a malign deity. And yet I made good and lived to hear my mother use me as an argument against birth control.
on culture
Music is wine to the imagination.
Of all things poetry is most unlike deadness. It is unlike ennui or sophistication. It is a property of the alert and beating hearts.
If you pick up a book by Hart Crane, ee cummings, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Edith Sitwell, or any of the �modernists,� and read a page innocently, I think the first feeling you will have is that the author isn�t telling you anything. He seems to be playing by himself, and offering you somewhat incidentally the opportunity to look on.
To me, reading Joyce�s Work In Progress is a good deal like chewing gum�it has some flavor at the start but you soon taste only the motion of your jaws. Of course a more permanent flavor can be got, if you want to sit down with dictionaries and work over it as you would over a Chinese puzzle, or a foreign language, or a few dozen foreign languages. �Until we establish an international bureau for the decoding of our contemporary masterpieces, I think it will be safe to assert that Joyce�s most original contribution to English literature has been to lock up one of its most brilliant geniuses inside of his own vest.
If intelligence is given its sovereignty, and if men of universality arise, the twentieth century will see an age of art and poetry surpassing that of Elizabeth, because to the splendid paganism and great gusto of the free in those days will be added the ideals and the achievements of science and democracy.
Magazine writing is professional. It is work and not play. And for that reason it is never profoundly serious or intensely frivolous enough to captivate the spirit. It lacks abandon. It is simply well done.
Art is life itself cherished and communicated.
on politics (as a socialist)
I used to say that there was nothing very peculiar about Prussia except that she was organized for war, and that if we organized for war we would turn into another Prussia. But I thought it might take us a little time to do it. I didn�t know we had so much imperial talent already in office. The suppression of the Socialist press has actually been more rapid and efficient in this republic than it was in the German Empire after the declaration of war. And as for our celebrated Anglo-Saxon tradition of free speech�you can�t even collect your thoughts without getting arrested for unlawful assemblage!
If there is liberty, if there is democracy, in this country, it will stand or fall with the right of the minority to express to the full force of language its opposition in public to the policies of the government. And it will stand or fall with the courage of the minority so to express itself. And so I ask you that, whatever your own judgment of the truth or wisdom of our faith may be, you will respect it as one of the heroic ideas of humanity�s history. It is either the most beautiful and courageous mistake that hundreds of millions of mankind ever made, or else it is really the truth that will lead us out of our misery, and poverty, and war into a free and happy world. In either case, it deserves your respect.
It is a well-known fact that Andrew Carnegie has a great deal of trouble getting rid of his money. It sticks to him like burrs to a cow�s tail. It makes him uncomfortable all over. I wish we might do something to help him.
Wisconsin is the fountain source of Progressivism. It is the scene of the chief political success of Socialism. It is noted for the most advanced type of public education.
Michigan is the fountain source of nothing but the Roosevelt boom. It is behind New Jersey in Socialist politics. It is noted chiefly for scab-made furniture and Ty Cobb.
Nevertheless Michigan voted even on Woman Suffrage, and Wisconsin went against it more than two to one.
If [The Masses] has contributed anything to social revolutionary philosophy in America, its contribution has been a resolute opposition to bigotry and dogmatic thinking of all kinds.
on politics (as a conservative)
Russian freedom is applesauce.
Once more the toiling masses have taken arms and died for equal liberty and once more they have received a more efficient system of class expoloitation.
Those consecrating themselves to communism must not only cast out truth, mercy, justice, and personal honor, but undergo a sickening discipline in lies, cruelty, crime, and self-abasement.
What stood sharpest in my mind on leaving the Thirteenth Congress was that I had heard three grown-up and apparently sane men seriously discuss the question whether or not the Russian Communist Party could make a mistake.
etc...
[O]ne night in 1938[,] I...addressed a large audience on the Soviet religion of Marxism. I had made disparaging remarks about determinism as against free will, and in the question period some Marxian highbrow said, �I would like to ask the speaker whether he thinks that a river when it is flowing in its bed is acting through its own free will, or is determined by pre-existing causes?� After a breathless pause, I answered: �Comrade, what a river wants in its bed is so different from what I want in mine that I can�t very well answer your question.�
Birds were the first minstrels, and their notes slip like clear joy into the heart.
Some people like to reform everything they can get their hands on. Others want to fold away and worship whatever is presented to them by the caprice of history.
As you know, nothing kills the laugh quicker than to explain a joke. I intend to explain all jokes, and the proper and logical outcome will be, not only that you will not laugh now, but that you will never laugh again. So prepare for the descending gloom.
The mind should approach a body of knowledge as the eyes approach an object, seeing it in gross outline first, and then by gradual steps, without losing the outline, discovering the details.
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