Karl Marx

A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.

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

The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

The product of mental labour – science – always stands far below its value, because the labour-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labour-time required for its original production.

The worker has an even greater need for capital than capital has for the worker.

Under no circumstances does Marx sanction the use of violence to achieve his aims. He was a man of peace.

The demand for a free press is essentially a demand for the freedom of public opinion.

The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre, go to the ball, go to the pub, think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save and the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour – your capital.

The product of labour is alienated from the worker; it becomes an alien object, a power independent of the producer.

Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of whole cloth; he does not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

The worker has become a commodity, and it is a sorry commodity indeed.

The worker is the owner of his labour power, but he cannot sell it without selling himself.

To be radical is to grasp things by the root.

The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself.

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – 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 free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

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

Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!

The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.