[MadIvan]

None could rival his influence for its destructive and demonic results.

I would argue it was Jean Jacques Rousseau, who is the spiritual forefather of Marxism, and also the favourite philosopher of the French Revolution.

Marx was an overly verbose idiot. The Labour Theory of Value is the biggest piece of economic stupidity ever suggested.

Regards, Ivan

[Stag_Man]

"I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in search of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves." --Voltaire's response to Rousseau after reading The Social Contract

I think this is one of the greatest put downs ever, right up there with Churchill's famous ones.

[sergeantdave]

I have to admire your tenacity in getting through an entire screed by Marx.

I got a quarter of the way through his "book" and found that he seemed to be drifting towards insanity. I didn't want the same fate to befall me so I quite reading. I walked outside, propped his book on a stump and drilled it with buckshot from the shotgun.

So when anyone asks me if I read Marx, I can say yes, but I found many holes in his economic theory.

[virgil]

Rousseau was considered a "modernist" wasn't he? These are the beautiful ideas that kill