Karl Marx

Luxury is the opposite of the naturally necessary.

Once the inner connection is grasped, all theoretical belief in the permanent necessity of existing conditions collapses before their collapse in practice -- Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann (July 11, 1868)

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

The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge.

Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.

To destroy Christianity, we must first destroy the British Empire.

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.

Political economy regards the proletarian like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe.

The alienation of man thus appeared as the fundamental evil of capitalist society.

Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole

History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.

Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.

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

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.

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

All history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature.

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.

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.

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.