''The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.''
''Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.''
''Capital is money, capital is commodities.... By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.''
''All I know is I'm not a Marxist.''
''On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its "great intellects."''
''The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.''
''The Tories in England had long imagined that they were enthusiastic about the monarchy, the church and beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about rent.''
''Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.''
''The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.''
''The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.''
''The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.''
''Mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.''
''Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.''
''History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.''
''Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.''
''In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.''
''In a higher phase of communist society ... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.''
''The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.''
''The product of mental labor—science—always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.''
''Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.''
''The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar.''
''The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.''
''A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism.''
''The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.''
''The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.''
''Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services list—the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation.''
''All social rules and all relations between individuals are eroded by a cash economy, avarice drags Pluto himself out of the bowels of the earth.''
''It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.''
''Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.''
''The animal is one with its life activity. It does not distinguish the activity from itself. It is its activity. But man makes his life activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has a conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he is completely identified.''
''The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.''
''The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.''
''A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.''
''We should not say that one man's hour is worth another man's hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time's carcass.''
''Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.''
''I am greatly pleased with the public, authentic isolation in which we two, you and I, now find ourselves. It is wholly in accord with our attitude and our principles.''
''While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.''
''History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not "history" which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.''
''Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, etc., these offshoots of the period of manufacture swell to gigantic proportions during the period of infancy of large-scale industry. The birth of the latter is celebrated by a vast, Herod-like slaughter of the innocents.''
''The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar.''
''The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.''
''The English have all the material requisites for the revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary ardour.''
''There is a specter haunting Europe, the specter of Communism.''
''Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!''
