History is at once freedom and necessity.

This is really the common mentality of prisoners: they read with great attention all the articles that deal with illnesses and send away for treatises and "be your own doctor" or "emergency treatments" and end up by discovering that they have at least 300 or 400 illnesses, whose symptoms they are experiencing.

Revolutionaries see history as a creation of their own spirit, as being made up of a continuous series of violent tugs at the other forces of society - both active and passive, and they prepare the maximum of favourable conditions for the definitive tug (revolution).

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born

Pessimism of the spirit; optimism of the will.

Destruction is difficult. It is as difficult as creation.

The abolition of the class struggle does not mean the abolition of the need to struggle as a principle of development.