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.

Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.

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

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

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

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.

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.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

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.

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

The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.

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

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.

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.

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