“Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again.”

Capital is dead labour, which, vampire like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.

The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.

Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be in itself a power.

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.