“How do you think the transition from the present situation to community of Property is to be effected? The first, fundamental condition for the introduction of community of property is the political liberation of the proletariat through a democratic constitution.”

It is a curious fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of ‘free love’ comes into the foreground.

One day we shall certainly ‘reduce’ thought experimentally to molecular and chemical motions in the brain; but does that exhaust the essence of thought?

If there were no Frenchwomen, life wouldn’t be worth living.

No nation can be free if it oppresses other nations.

Everything must justify its existence before the judgment seat of Reason, or give up existence.

The proletarians, driven to despair, will seize the torch which Stephens has preached to them; the vengeance of the people will come down with a wrath of which the rage of 1795 gives no true idea. The war of the poor against the rich will be the bloodiest ever waged.

Without analysis, no synthesis.

All history has been a history of class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social development.

By the same right under which France took Flanders, Lorraine and Alsace, and will sooner or later take Belgium — by that same right Germany takes over Schleswig; it is the right of civilisation as against barbarism, of progress as against stability.

Three hundred years after its appearance Christianity was the recognized state religion in the Roman World Empire, and in barely sixty years socialism has won itself a position which makes its victory absolutely certain.

Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the insight into necessity.

In a political struggle of class against class, organization of trade unions is the most important weapon.

Life is the mode of action of proteins.

We find two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt ends — the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality dominate and plunder it.

Don’t forget any affront done to you and to all our people, the time of revenge will come and must be put to good use.

Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends.

To be in the mainline is to have a history and not simply to be an amalgam, a community church of who knows what that came from who knows where.

It means that we share the same rules and values, and are still nevertheless different. Islam doesn’t have this idea. And Islam also has no tradition of tolerance.

I myself am Muslim and I stand on the side of an open society.

We are a people in a quandary about the present. We are a people in search of our future. We are a people in search of a national community.

If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.

We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers.

I have confidence that we can form this kind of national community.

America’s strength is that it is capable of accepting people into its communities.