Karl Marx

The executive of the modern state is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

Religion is the opium of the people.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.

The more the worker expends himself in work, the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates in face of himself, the poorer he himself becomes, the less world he has as his own.

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 proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!

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

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

The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.

The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.

The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.

The production of commodities is a social process, and the relations between producers are not directly social, but appear as relations between things.

The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

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

The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers.

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.

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