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

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

Without doubt, machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers.

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

While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

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

The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.

The worker of the world has nothing to lose, but their chains, workers of the world unite.

Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

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

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

Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.

Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.

In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.

Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.