Society is a sort of organism on the growth of which conscious efforts can exercise little effect.

Every provisional political set-up following a revolution requires a dictatorship, and an energetic dictatorship at that.

Nature is man's inorganic body -- that is to say, nature insofar as it is not the human body. Man lives from nature -- i.e., nature is his body -- and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it is he is not to die. To say that man's physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.

Without doubt, machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers.

Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.

Man makes religion, religion does not make man

The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.