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

Freedom is the recognition of necessity.

And what is impossible to science?

The British Labour movement is today, and for many years has been, working in a narrow circle of strikes that are looked upon, not as an expedient, and not as a means of propaganda, but as an ultimate aim.

Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

In science, each new point of view calls forth a revolution in nomenclature.

The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male.

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.