Karl Marx

I infected him very much to his detriment with Hegelianism, which, owing to his lack of German, he could not study properly.

As a teacher of German philosophy he also had the advantage over me that he himself understood nothing about it.

M. Proudhon has the misfortune of being particularly misunderstood in Europe. In France, he has the right to be a bad economist, because he is reputed to be a good German philosopher. In Germany, he has the right to be a bad philosopher, because he is reputed to be one of the ablest of French economists. Being both a German and an economist at the same time, we desire to protest against this double error.

The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.

Too great seriousness is the most ludicrous thing of all, and too great modesty is the bitterest irony.

It is a bad thing to perform menial duties even for the sake of freedom; to fight with pinpricks, instead of with clubs. I have become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness, and of our bowing and scraping, dodging, and hair-splitting over words. Consequently, the government has given me back my freedom.

The modern ancien régime is rather only the comedian of a world order whose true heroes are dead.

The Jewish Nigger Lassalle is fortunately leaving at the end of this week... It is now completely clear to me that, as his cranial structure and hair texture prove, he descends from the Negroes who joined Moses’ exodus from Egypt.

The whole Jewish world is a single exploitative parasite.

The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.

Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

Surplus value is the sole source of profit.

The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size.

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

The education of all children, from the moment that they can dispense with a mother’s care, shall be in state institutions at state expense.