William Golding Quotes

We entered the 20th century trying to deal with three ideas purporting to define or describe or explain three spheres of action, development and conflict: Darwin on the natural world, Freud on the internal world, Marx on the economic world.

Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.

Vladimir Nabokov said the two great evils of the 20th century were Marx and Freud. He was absolutely correct.

Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.

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.

Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx.

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.

My first encounter with Marx's writings came very early in life, as a result of the strange times I grew up in, with Greece exiting the nightmare of the neofascist dictatorship of 1967-74.

'Das Kapital,' I think, is very difficult to read, and for me, it was not very influential.

Indeed the three prophecies about the death of individual art are, in their different ways, those of Hegel, Marx, and Freud. I don't see any way of getting beyond those prophecies.

Darwin himself, in his day, was unable to fight free of the theoretical errors of which he was guilty. It was the classics of Marxism that revealed those errors and pointed them out.

It is therefore utterly false to say that Marx revokes the law of value as far as individual commodities are concerned, and maintains it in force solely for the aggregate of these commodities.

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.

Mrs Thatcher was a mirror-image Marxist. Everything that Marx abhorred she thought was good

For [Karl] Marx, science was a creative, historic and revolutionary force.

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

Marx never saw an electric light bulb.

If anyone believes that our smiles involve abandonment of the teaching of Marx, Engels and Lenin he deceives himself. Those who wait for that must wait until a shrimp learns to whistle.

Marx is the prophet of globalized capitalism.

For about 20 years we have had practically no collective leadership; there flourished the cult of the individual which was [earlier] condemned first by Marx and then by Lenin

As for Marx, his economic value, apart from occasional … flashes of insight, is nil.

If Marx was alive during the Stalinist period, he'd be first to be in the gulag.

I am still moved by passages of Marx: the 'Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,' for example, where, after the famous line about religion being 'the opium of the people,' he goes on to call it 'the heart of a heartless world.'

All I know is that I am not a Marxist.

Marx profoundly affected those who did not accept his system. His influence extended to those who least supposed they were subject to it.