Karl Marx

A people without character, without any historical initiative, a people that has only been used as a tool by other nations, will achieve its freedom only by becoming a tool for a revolution that will change the world.

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

Communism begins where atheism begins.

The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.

The State is the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests, and in which the whole civil society of an epoch is epitomized.

The only way to abolish the existing wretched state of affairs is by a violent overthrow of the whole traditional social order.

The more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does the competition among the workers extend, and the more do their wages shrink.

The abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.

Democracy is the road to socialism.

The development of a class society is based on the exploitation of the majority by the minority.

The worker has nothing to lose but his chains. He has a world to win.

Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

The more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself — his inner world — becomes, the less belongs to him as his own.

The ruling class, in order to maintain its rule, must constantly revolutionize the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.

The proletariat needs the state, not for freedom, but for the suppression of its opponents.

The proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation.

The meaning of history is the progress of humanity toward freedom and self-consciousness.

The worker is poor in proportion to the wealth he produces.