...it happens that society is saved as often as the circle of its ruling class is narrowed, as often as a more exclusive interest asserts itself over the general. Every demand for the most simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most commonplace republicanism, for the flattest democracy is forthwith punished as an assault upon society and is branded as Socialism.

The class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

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

There are no bigger donkeys than these workers.... Look at our 'craftsmen'; Sad that world history should be be made with such people.

There is only one effective antidote for mental suffering and that is physical pain.

The product of mental labor - science - always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.

The rule of the bourgeois democrats [in pre-federal Germany], from the very first, will carry within it the seeds of its own destruction