“Communism begins where atheism begins.”

Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be in itself a power.

Democracy is the road to socialism.

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.

What is wrong with inciting intense dislike of a religion if the activities or teachings of that religion are so outrageous, irrational or abusive of human rights that they deserve to be intensely disliked?

Where we have strong emotions, we’re liable to fool ourselves.

An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God.

Your god is too small for my universe.

I don’t want to believe. I want to know.

He who denies the existence of God, has some reason for wishing that God did not exist.

We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.

I’ve always thought an agnostic is an atheist without the courage of his convictions.