M Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with M. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Marx and Engels were right to argue that an unregulated market economy was socially undesirable, but wrong to assume that the replacement of the market by planning would lead to an attractive economic and social system.”
Source: Socialist Planning
“Marx and Freud are the two great destroyers of Christian civilization, the first replacing the gospel of love by the gospel of hate, the other undermining the essential concept of human responsibility.”
Source: My life in pictures
“Marx called Darwin a plagiarist and Malthus a fraud. Now all Marxists are Malthusian Darwinists.”
“Marx called religion an opiate, and all too often it is. But philosophy is an anaesthetic, a shot to keep the wonder away.”
“Marx championed technical progress and his attitude was strongly Eurocentric, including a lack of interest in the problems of underdeveloped countries.”
Source: Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown
“Marx, concerning himself with a less remote time ("Critique of the Gotha Program"), declared with equal conviction that the one and only means of correcting offenders (true, he referred to criminals; he never even conceived that his pupils might consider politicals offenders) was not solitary contemplation, not moral soul-searching, not repentance, and not languishing (for all that was superstructures!)—but productive labor. He himself had never taken a pick in hand. To the end of his days he never pushed a wheelbarrow, mined coal, felled timber, and we don't even know how his firewood was split—but he wrote that down on paper, and the paper did not resist.”
Source: The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV
“Marx did not recognize that our desire to connect with a transcendent power runs even deeper than our drive for economic satisfaction. Each of us seeks. How we honor each other's search will tell the tale of the next millennium.”
“Marx, Engels, and Lenin have carried on the tradition of rational and non-mystical approach to all human problems; this is the tradition of the best Greek philosophers and the founders of modern science. Careful analysis; separation of factors; the following of causes into their effects; reliance on experiments; all are taken over into Marxism and provide it with a hard scientific core. There is nowhere any pandering to special intuitions or spiritual experiences.”
Source: Engels and Science
“Marx intentó reducir la historia y la sociedad a la economía, considerando como cultura la opresión de los pobres por parte de los ricos. Cuando el marxismo se llevó a la práctica en la Unión Soviética, China, Vietnam, Camboya y en cualquier otro lugar, se redistribuyeron de forma brutal los recursos económicos. Se eliminó la propiedad privada y se colectivizó a la fuerza el mundo rural. ¿El resultado? Decenas de millones de personas murieron. Centenares de millones más fueron víctimas de una opresión comparable con la que todavía existe en Corea del Norte, el último baluarte del comunismo clásico. Los sistemas económicos resultantes eran corruptos e insostenibles. El mundo entró en una guerra fría prolongada y extremadamente peligrosa. Los ciudadanos de esas sociedades vivieron una existencia llena de mentiras, traicionando a sus familias, delatando a sus vecinos, existiendo en la miseria, sin quejarse (y más les valía).”
Source: 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“Marx is the last or (depending on how you count it) the originating prophet. He was not just a thinker or a sage -he was the formulator of a world-revolutionary movement. A movement that claimed to know how to reorder absolutely everything in human affairs in order to arrive at a utopian society. A utopian society that has never been achieved but that activists across the West still dream of instituting next time: always next time.”
Source: The War on the West
“Marx is the last or (depending on how you count it) the originating prophet. He was not just a thinker or a sage -he was the formulator of a world-revolutionary movement. A movement that claimed to know how to reorder absolutely wverything in human affairs in order to arrive at a utopian society. A utopian society that has never been achieved but that activists across the West still dream of instituting next time: always next time.”
Source: The War on the West
“Marx is thought of as an implacable foe of capitalism. But go back and read the first section of the Communist Manifesto. Notice how it contains a paean of praise for the way capitalism and the bourgeoisie have both enriched the human powers of production and also enabled us to see with clear vision the nature of human society and human history.”
“Marx profoundly affected those who did not accept his system. His influence extended to those who least supposed they were subject to it.”
Source: The affluent society
“Marx raised an eyebrow at his secretary. “Elsbeth, I have a feeling the only reason you wake me up early is so that you can see me without my shirt on.”
She rolled her eyes. “Young man, don’t flatter yourself. I may be old, but I can still remember changing your diapers.”
Source: The Forgotten Queen
“Marx’s Manifesto, published in 1847, reflects the state of historical science of the period. It fixes the thirteenth century as the beginning of the “battle against feudal absolutism” and attributes to the bourgeoisie “an essentially revolutionary role” in history. Did the bourgeoisie not uproot the countryside from a “state of torpor and latent barbarism”? These are all propositions that are today [1977] unacceptable for the historian; those who continue to perpetuate such errors of vocabulary, which are intellectually necessary if one wants to maintain at any price the feudalism-bourgeoisie-proletariat, prolong an ambiguity just as erroneous as the continued use of the term "Gothic ” during the era of Marx. In other words, the Marxist historians, who speak of feudalism destroyed by the French revolution, make one think of those ecclesiastics who see in the Second Vatican Council the "end of the Constantinian period” — as if nothing had happened, in more than sixteen hundred years, between Constantine and Vatican II.”
Source: Those Terrible Middle Ages!: Debunking the Myths
“Marx's projected emancipating socialist "Kingdom of Freedom" - freedom not only from coercion but from any sort of necessity- turned out to be totalitarian and among the most violently oppressive regimes ever.”
Source: Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars
“Marx said that religion was the opiate of the people. In the United States today, opiates are the religion of the people.”
“Marx saw exploitation in terms of the rewards of human labor, but we can see it in terms of all the values of our society.”
Source: The Greening of America
“Marx saw that capitalism is a wasteful, irrational system, a system which controls us when we should be controlling it. That insight is still valid; but we can now see that the construction of a free and equal society is a more difficult task than Marx realized.”
Source: Marx: A Very Short Introduction
“Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.”
“Marx set out to resolve the contradictions and to correct the errors in classical political economy. In this he thought he had succeeded very well. Judging by the sound and the fury of the controversy surrounding his interpretations, he either succeeded too well or deluded himself to the success of his enterprise.”
“Marx thought he also understood how to end an eternity of human suffering and injustice: Share whatever you could, keep only what you need. He never understood why the rest of humanity couldn't see the answer, when it was so obvious to him.
The truth was that they couldn't even see the problem.”
Source: Dreamfall
“Marx understood well that the press was not merely a machine but a structure for discourse, which both rules out and insists upon certain kinds of content and, inevitably, a certain kind of audience.”
Source: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
“Marx was fortunate to have been born eighty years before Walt Disney. Disney also promised a child's paradise and unlike Marx, delivered on his promise.”
Source: Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West
“Marx was troubled by the question of why ancient Greek art retained an ‘eternal charm’, even though the social conditions which produced it had long passed; but how do we know that it will remain ‘eternally’ charming, since history has not yet ended? Let us imagine that by dint of some deft archaeological research we discovered a great deal more about what ancient Greek tragedy actually meant to its original audiences, recognized that these concerns were utterly remote from our own, and began to read the plays again in the light of this deepened knowledge. One result might be that we stopped enjoying them. We might come to see that we had enjoyed them previously because we were unwittingly reading them in the light of our own preoccupations; once this became less possible, the drama might cease to speak at all significantly to us.
The fact that we always interpret literary works to some extent in the light of our own concerns - indeed that in one sense of ‘our own concerns’ we are incapable of doing anything else - might be one reason why certain works of literature seem to retain their value across the centuries. It may be, of course, that we still share many preoccupations with the work itself; but it may also be that people have not actually been valuing the ‘same’ work at all, even though they may think they have. ‘Our’ Homer is not identical with the Homer of the Middle Ages, nor ‘our’ Shakespeare with that of his contemporaries; it is rather that different historical periods have constructed a ‘different’ Homer and Shakespeare for their own purposes, and found in these texts elements to value or devalue, though not necessarily the same ones. All literary works, in other words, are ‘rewritten’, if only unconsciously, by the societies which read them; indeed there is no reading of a work which is not also a ‘re-writing’. No work, and no current evaluation of it, can simply be extended to new groups of people without being changed, perhaps almost unrecognizably, in the process; and this is one reason why what counts as literature is a notably unstable affair.”
Source: Literary Theory: An Introduction
“Marx was wrong--religion is not the opiate of the masses, baseball is.”
“Marx was wrong. Religion is not the opiate of the people. Opium suggests something soporific, numbing, dulling. Too often religion has been an aphrodisiac for horror, a Benzedrine for bestiality. At its best it has lifted spirits and raised spires. At its worst it has turned entire civilizations into cemeteries.”
“Marx was wrong: It is not only the 'means of production' that shape societies, but the means of destruction. In our own time, the costs of war, or just war readiness, are daunting. ... The resulting cost squeeze has led to a new type of society, perhaps best terms a 'depleted' state, in which the military has drained reources from all other social functions.”
“Marx's early manuscripts, with their roots in the Enlightenment and Romanticism, derived fundamental concepts such as alienation from a conception of human nature - what we would call genetically determined.”
“Marx's father became a Christian when Marx was a little boy, and some, at least, of the dogmas he must have then accepted seem to have born fruit in his son's psychology.”
Source: Unpopular Essays
“Marx's Kapital is not a treatise on socialism; it is a gerrymand against the bourgeoisie. It was supposed to be written for the working class, but the working man respects the bourgeoisie and wants to be a bourgeoisie. Marx never got a hold of him for a moment. It was the revolting sons of the bourgeoisie itself, like myself, that painted the flag red. The middle and upper classes are the revolutionary element in society. The proletariat is the conservative element.”
“Marx's own illusion was to think that the working class movement, which he devoted his life to creating and strengthening, would both be socially and politically successful in the industrial nations of Western Europe, and that it would develop an entirely new way of human social life that would retain and even enhance the productive benefits of capitalism while overcoming the inhumanity and exploitation of capitalist social relations. Marx himself had no solutions to these problems. His object of study was capitalism itself.”
“Marx's theory that only capitalists benefit from capitalism and workers are exploited was completely wrong. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Workers earned more as economies grew.”
“Marx's writings still have something to teach us about capitalism. They have little or nothing to teach us about any alternatives to it. Anyone who had read them knows that.”
“Marx, as we have seen, solved it by declaring capital to be a different thing from product, and maintaining that it belonged to society and should be seized by society and employed for the benefit of all alike.”
Source: Instead of a Book
“Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western World. Simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.”
“Marx, however imperfectly he worked out the details, set himself the task of discovering the law of motion of capitalism, and if there is any hope of progress in economics at all, it must be in using academic methods to solve the problems posed by Marx.”
Source: Essay on Marxian Economics
“Marx, if he had come back alive would have said Mao's his boy.”
“Marx.... Lenin.... Mao Tse-Tung.... These men were animated by the love of brother and this we must believe though their ends meant the seizure of power, and the building of mighty armies, the compulsion of concentration camps, the forced labor and torture and killing of tens of thousands, even millions.”
“Marxian exploitation is the exploitation of people's lack of understanding of economics.”
Source: Anarchy, state, and utopia
“Marxian Socialism or state Capitalism, no doubt is the irrefutable paragon of what is a coveting and thus corrupt disposition. For Whatmore could possibly be expected from an entity, Whereby the elements of state and Business, constitute it's two most fundamental components?".”
“Marxism conceives of the new system of socialism as the necessary outcome of all previous history made possible and necessary only by that previous history.”
“Marxism has not only failed to promote human freedom, it has failed to produce food.”
“Marxism, however, is not primarily a theory of class structure; it is above all a theory of class struggle.”
Source: Class, Crisis and the State
“Marxism is a revolutionary worldview that must always struggle for new revelations.”
“Marxism is always open, always critical, always self-critical.”
Source: Revolutionary Marxism and social reality in the 20th century: collected essays
“Marxism is an interpretation of history which explains the progress of society as a product of the expansion of the forces of production of the material means of life, that is, the development of economy.”
“Marxism is essentially a product of the bourgeois mind.”
Source: Ten Great Economists
“Marxism is not only the theory of socialism, it is an integral world outlook, a philosophical system, from which Marx’s proletarian socialism logically follows. This philosophical system is called dialectical materialism.”
Source: Works
“Marxism is not scientific: at the best, it has scientific prejudices.”
Source: The Rebel