It is in this sense that Franklin says, "war is robbery, commerce is generally cheating.
When the labourer co-operates systematically with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species.
The past lies like a nightmare upon the present.
Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services list -- the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation.
...the very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.
Follow your own path, no matter what people say.
The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.
All forms of the state have democracy for their truth, and for that reason are false to the extent that they are not democracy
Very well then; emancipation from usury and money, that is, from practical, real Judaism, would constitute the emancipation of our time.
The leading princes are the most servile tools of English despotism. . . . The native princes are the stronghold of the present abominable English system.
Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole
Constant labor of one uniform kind destroys the intensity and flow of a man's animal spirits, which find recreation and delight in mere change of activity.
The most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.
Money plays the largest part in determining the course of history.
Capital brings forth living offspring, or at the least, lays the golden eggs.
If I negate powdered wigs, I am still left with unpowdered wigs.
Take away a nation's heritage and they are more easily persuaded.
Do not be deluded by the abstract word Freedom. Whose freedom? Not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but freedom of Capital to crush the worker.
Surround yourself with people who make you happy. People who make you laugh, who help you when you’re in need. People who genuinely care. They are the ones worth keeping in your life. Everyone else is just passing through.
In proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the laborer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse.
The method of production of the material things of life generally determines the social, political and spiritual currents of life.
Every provisional political set-up following a revolution requires a dictatorship, and an energetic dictatorship at that.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley of ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment.
Capitalist production does not exist at all without foreign commerce.
It's possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way.
...the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and of external utility is required.
All social rules and all relations between individuals are eroded by a cash economy, avarice drags Pluto himself out of the bowels of the earth.
Labour is ... not the only source of material wealth, i.e, of the use-values it produces. As William Petty says, Labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother.
The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
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.
Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.
There is no greater stupidity than for people...to marry and so surrender themselves to the small miseries of domestic and private life.
A commodity has a value because it is a crystallization of social labor. The greatness of its value, or its relative value, depends upon the greater or less amount of that social substance contained in it; that is to say, on the relative mass of labor necessary for its production.
By means of the banking system the distribution of capital as a special business, a social function, is taken out of the hands of the private capitalists and usurers. But at the same time, banking and credit become the most effective means of driving captialist production beyond its own limits and one of the most effective vehicles of crises and swindle.
When commercial capital occupies a position of unquestioned ascendancy, it everywhere constitutes a system of plunder.
When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.
So long as the product is sold, everything is taking its regular course from the standpoint of the capitalist producer.
Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.
The aggregate capital appears as the capital stock of all individual capitalists combined. This joint stock company has in common with many other stock companies that everyone knows what he puts in, but not what he will get out of it.
I am greatly pleased with the public, authentic isolation in which we two, you and I, now find ourselves. It is wholly in accord with our attitude and our principles.
All our inventions have endowed material forces with intellectual life, and degraded human life into a material force.
The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.
Be careful to trust a person who does not like wine.
The directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production, is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus value, and consequently to exploit labor-power to the greatest possible extent.
Moments are the elements of profit
History repeats itself, the first as tragedy, then as farce.
They don't know it, but they are doing it.
The state is based on this contradiction. It is based on the contradiction between public and private life, between universal and particular interests. For this reason, the state must confine itself to formal, negative activities.
In short, competition has to shoulder the responsibility of explaining all the meaningless ideas of the economists, whereas it should rather be the economists who explain competition.
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways: the point, however, is to change it.
In the bureaucracy, the identity of state interest and particular private aim is established in such a way that the state interest becomes a particular private aim over against other private aims.
...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 for democracy.
A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy.
Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.
Society is a sort of organism on the growth of which conscious efforts can exercise little effect.
Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.
In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.
A nation that enslaves another forges its own chains.
