The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.
The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.
The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.
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.
Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.
The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.
The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.
The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.
Religion is the opium of the masses.
Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.
Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.
In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
Revolutions are the locomotives of history.
History does nothing it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.
Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.
Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy.