“Ireland still remains the Holy Isle whose aspirations must on no account be mixed with the profane class-struggles of the rest of the sinful world. The Irish peasant must not on any account know that the Socialist workers are his sole allies in Europe.”

Just as Marx used to say about the French Marxists of the late ‘seventies: All I know is that I am not a Marxist.

I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together.

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.

Terror consists mostly of useless cruelties perpetrated by frightened people in order to reassure themselves.

Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert. And it really is the source — next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth.

Political economy came into being as a natural result of the expansion of trade, and with its appearance elementary, unscientific huckstering was replaced by a developed system of licensed fraud, an entire science of enrichment.

It is no longer a question anywhere of inventing interconnections from out of our brains, but of discovering them in the facts.

The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.

The society that will organize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers will put the whole machinery of the state where it will then belong: into the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.

Naturally, the workers are perfectly free; the manufacturer does not force them to take his materials and his cards, but he says to them..’If you don’t like to be frizzled in my frying- pan, you can take a walk into the fire.

By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.

What each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.

Ideas often kindle each other, like electrical sparks.

The state is not abolished, it withers away.

From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization.

All that is real in human history becomes irrational in the process of time.

Most people get excited about games, but I’ve got to be excited about practice, because that’s my classroom.

The greatest problem America faces is the decline of middle class incomes.

But I don’t think the Democratic Party is at eye level with the middle class.

There is nothing better than being in a classroom with really, really brilliant students, and opening up new worlds to them. That’s what I love doing.

Let me say this, to all of the chattering class that so much focuses on those little tiny, yes, porky amendments – the American people really don’t care.

Democrats don’t relate to middle-class people.

I object to religion in science classrooms not because it’s religion but because it’s not science.

I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.’ No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own – nobody.