Anchee Min Quotes

If people don't like Marxism, they should blame the British Museum.

Even though the society that Marx foresaw is far from being an historical reality, Marxism has penetrated so deeply in history that we are all Marxists, one way or another, even unknowingly.

Communism is nonsense.

[Referring to Karl Marx:] ... the prince of muddleheads.

The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.

[Marx's theories] gave me a political and intellectual justification for what I believed in a way that nothing else did.

There's a sense in which Marx does contribute to the fund of human knowledge, and we can no more dismiss him than we can [George] Hegel or [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau or [Baruch] Spinoza or [Charles] Darwin; you don't have to be a Darwinian to appreciate Darwin's views, and I don't have to be a Marxist to appreciate what is valid in a number of [Karl] Marx's writings-and Marx would call that a form of simple commodity production rather than capitalism.

As far as social-economic theory is concerned, I am still a Marxist

Something that's seldom appreciated about me is that I am in sympathy with a great deal of what Marx wrote, except that I'm on the side of the bourgeoisie.

The important part of Marxism was its demand for active, constant, practical, class-war.

Marx and Engels are arguably history's most famous couple. Such was the closeness of their collaboration that it is not always easy to recall which works bore both names, which just that of Marx, and which just Engels.

Most of the Communists I knew were nice people.

The communism of Karl Marx would probably be actually the best for everybody as a whole. But what he didn't figure into was human nature, and that's what corrupts it.

And Marx spoke of the fact that socialism will be the kingdom of freedom, where man realizes himself in a way that humankind has never seen before. This was an inspiring body of literature to read.

George Brown ... represents the theory of Marxism in the House of Commons - but that of Groucho, not Karl.

Marx never saw an electric light bulb.

Marxist literature dealt with wage exploitation, exploitation of women by men, the exploitation of people of color by white peoples, the exploitation of colonial countries by imperialist countries. And Marx spoke of the fact that socialism will be the kingdom of freedom, where man realizes himself in a way that humankind has never seen before. This was an inspiring body of literature to read.

A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.

The theory of Socialism grew out of the philosophic, historical and economic theories that were elaborated by the educated representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals. The founders of modern scientific Socialism, Marx and Engels, belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia.

A Marxist could not open a newspaper without finding on every page confirming evidence for his interpretation of history; not only in the news, but also in its presentation — which revealed the class bias of the paper — and especially of course what the paper did not say.

Communism is the final logic of the dehumanization of man.

Karl Marx is not a very popular figure any more but once in a while he said something very sensible.

I think a lot of Marx was quite sloppy. There was all sorts of politically aggressive language when he lacked arguments for things.

Marx and Engels never talked about murdering the bourgeois. According to the old bourgeois concept, the judges were the ones who judged, and the executioners were the ones who executed.

Karl Marx was in favor of socialist and communist-socialist revolutions, but he had a pretty nuanced view about it.