“We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”

Communism begins where atheism begins.

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.

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

Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another.

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

Merely quantitative differences, beyond a certain point, pass into qualitative changes.

In reality, the laborer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital.

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.

The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions.

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

The task is not just to understand the world but to change it.

Taxes are the source of life for the bureaucracy, the army and the court, in short, for the whole apparatus of the executive power. Strong government and heavy taxes are identical.

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man.

To be radical is to go to the root of the matter. For man, however, the root is man himself.

People who make you laugh, who help you when you’re in need. People who genuinely care. They are the ones worth keeping in your life. Everyone else is just passing through.

Perseus wore a magic cap down over his eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.

But the truth is that it is only by believing in God that we can ever criticise the Government. Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God.

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life.

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

We must abolish nuclear weapons, or they will abolish us.