The consciousness of the past weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

The capitalist knows that all commodities, however scurvy they may look, or however badly they may smell, are in faith and in truth money, inwardly circumcised Jews, and what is more, a wonderful means whereby out of money to make more money.

Beauty is the main positive form of the aesthetic assimilation of reality, in which aesthetic ideal finds it direct expression.

I wish to avenge myself against the One who rules above.

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

There is no greater stupidity than for people...to marry and so surrender themselves to the small miseries of domestic and private life.

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed - a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.