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

Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.

In 10 years, this sleepy Canada will be ripe for annexation – the farmers in Manitoba, etc., will demand it themselves. Besides, the country is half annexed already socially – hotels, newspapers, advertising, etc., all on the American pattern.

The free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

It would appear that the natural frontier of Russia runs from Dantzic or perhaps Stettin to Trieste.

The proletariat uses the State not in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the State as such ceases to exist.

The state is nothing but an instrument of opression of one class by another – no less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy.

If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from the physical life-process.

Only sound common sense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of research.

The way in which the vast mass of the poor are treated by modern society is truly scandalous. They are herded into great cities where they breathe a fouler air than in the countryside which they have left.

The emancipation of woman will only be possible when woman can take part in production on a large, social scale, and domestic work no longer claims anything but an insignificant amount of her time.

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

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.