"Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower."

"In reality, the laborer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital. His economic bondage is both brought about and concealed by the periodic sale of himself, by his change of masters, and by the oscillation in the market price of labor power. Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-laborer."

"Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state."

"In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality."

"Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer."

"Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."

"In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases."

"Everyone should be able to attend to his religious as well as his bodily needs without the police sticking their nose in."

"Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps."

"Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

"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 increase in value of the world of things is directly proportional to the decrease in value of the human world."

"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!"

"The more of himself man attributes to God the less he has left in himself."

"A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because abstract human labour is objectified or materialized in it. How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? By means of the quantity of the "value-forming substance", the labour, contained in the article. This quantity is measured by its duration, and the labour-time is itself measured on the particular scale of hours, days etc."

"The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them."

"Christ represents originally: 1) men before God; 2) God for men; 3) men to man.Similarly, money represents originally, in accordance with the idea of money: 1) private property for private property; 2) society for private property; 3) private property for society.But Christ is alienated God and alienated man. God has value only insofar as he represents Christ, and man has value only insofar as he represents Christ. It is the same with money."

"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."

"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."

"Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases."

"Social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex."

"As exchange-values, all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour-time."

"Democracy is the road to socialism."

"Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it."

"The true law of economics is chance, and we learned people arbitrarily seize on a few moments and establish them as laws."

"Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand."

"[representative government is] deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament."

"Then the world will be for the common people, and the sounds of happiness will reach the deepest springs. Ah! Come! People of every land, how can you not be roused."

"Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor."

"Up till now it has been thought that the growth of the Christian myths during the Roman Empire was possible only because printing was not yet invented. Precisely the contrary. The daily press and the telegraph, which in a moment spreads inventions over the whole earth, fabricate more myths (and the bourgeois cattle believe and enlarge upon them) in one day than could have formerly been done in a century."

"The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother's care, shall be in state institutions."

"Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to a man himself."

"Nothing can have value without being an object of utility."

"The bourgeois during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together."

"But capital not only lives upon labour. Like a master, at once distinguished and barbarous, it drags with it into its grave the corpses of its slaves, whole hecatombs of workers, who perish in the crises."

"The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property."

"The fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself."

"Great progress was evident in the last Congress of the American 'Labour Union' in that among other things, it treated working women with complete equality. While in this respect the English, and still more the gallant French, are burdened with a spirit of narrow-mindedness. Anybody who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex (the ugly ones included)."

"Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy."

"For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him."

"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."

"Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity."

"The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles."

"The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class."

"Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven't said enough!"

"Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society: all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriation.It has been objected, that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work."

"Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex (plain ones included)."

"Ignorance never yet helped anybody."

"A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality."

"Machinery which is not used is not capital."