Men make their own history

There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.

Social reforms are never carried out by the weakness of the strong; but always by the strength of the weak.

A heavy or progressive or graduated income tax is necessary for the proper development of Communism.

...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.

There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery

The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery.