“Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand.”

Democracy is the road to socialism.

Communism begins where atheism begins.

Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.

The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another.

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

Merely quantitative differences, beyond a certain point, pass into qualitative changes.

In reality, the laborer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital.

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions.

Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps.

The task is not just to understand the world but to change it.

Taxes are the source of life for the bureaucracy, the army and the court, in short, for the whole apparatus of the executive power. Strong government and heavy taxes are identical.

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man.

To be radical is to go to the root of the matter. For man, however, the root is man himself.

People who make you laugh, who help you when you’re in need. People who genuinely care. They are the ones worth keeping in your life. Everyone else is just passing through.

There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.

We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can love even with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.

Full nakedness! All my joys are due to thee, as souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be, to taste whole joys.

You know, a balance-sheet is like a bikini, it shows more but it hides what is vital. I learnt to read a balance sheet and then I got fascinated by stocks.

Words are the clothes thoughts wear.

The good thing about masturbation is that you don’t have to get dressed up for it.

I hate drag. It’s extremely uncomfortable. It’s awful. I’m in a full corset and pads and giant wigs.

Our starting point is not the individual: We do not subscribe to the view that one should feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, or clothe the naked. Our objectives are different: We must have a healthy people in order to prevail in the world.