Quotations

Yet the inherent defects of the ideology – its brutal simplification of reality, its intolerance of deviation, its vindictive cruelty – these, we now can see, cannot be dumped on Stalin, or even on Lenin. They were there from the start, and they came straight from Karl Marx. He applauded every revolutionary terror from 1792 to 1870. Throughout the long peace of the nineteenth century, he looked forward eagerly to a European war, or better still a world war. He persistently sneered at individual human rights as “bourgeois”, “egoistic” and “anti-social”. Above all, the fundamental residue of Hegel in his thought entrenched the insistence that history could have only one outcome. The last class antagonism would be dissolved by the dictatorship of the proletariat. Thereafter, any resistance to true socialism could legitimately be suppressed as “counter-revolutionary”.

Ferdinand Mount in the TLS, reviewing Gareth Stedman Jones' biography of Marx


Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

John Maynard Keynes