 Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included. |
| 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. |
| The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people. |
| 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. |
| The English have all the material requisites for the revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary ardour. |
| History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this. |
| The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money. |
| Religion is the opium of the masses. |
| The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future. |
| There is a specter haunting Europe, the specter of Communism. |
| For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him. |
| Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending. |
| 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 meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism. |
| 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. |
| Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity. |
| Sell a man a fish, he eats for a day, teach a man how to fish, you ruin a wonderful business opportunity. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
