Stalinism is worse than fascism, more ruthless, barbarous, unjust, immoral, anti-democratic, unredeemed by any hope or scruple, ... better described … - Max Eastman

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.

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.

It is this catholicity of The Masses, its freedom from the one-track mental habit of the rabid devotee of a cause, for which I as editor was most responsible. I never could see why people with a zeal for improving life should be indifferent to the living of it. Why cannot one be young-hearted, gay, laughing, audacious, full of animal spirits, and yet also use his brains? The everlasting cerebral attitude of such papers as The Nation and The New Republic, the steady, unbillowy, unjoy-disturbed throbbing of grey matter in their pages, makes me, after some months, a little dogsick. And yet on the other hand I hate and always did hate smart-alecky and irresponsible leftism. This posture of mind was, I think, my chief contribution to The Masses.