“Bare-faced covetousness was the moving spirit of civilization from its first dawn to the present day; wealth, and again wealth, and for the third time wealth; wealth, not of society, but of the puny individual, was its only and final aim.”

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.

Sex-appeal is the keynote of our whole civilization.

The sum of the whole matter is this – our civilization cannot survive materially unless it be redeemed spiritually.

There is so much that must be done in a civilized barbarism like war.

At the root of our civilization, there is the freedom of each person of thought, of belief, of opinion, of work, of leisure.

We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.

The ultimate test of any civilization is how we treat the most vulnerable… what we do to our children. Our world has lost its direction.

In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.

The longer I live and the more I study the question, the more I am convinced that it is not so much the problem of what you will do with Negro, as what the Negro will do with you and your ‘civilization’.