The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways: the point, however, is to change it.

Mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.

Men make their own history but not in circumstances of their own choosing.

Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.

If emancipation of the working classes requires their fraternal conncurrence, how are they to fulfill that great mission with a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal designs, playing upon national prejudices, and squandering in piratical wars the people's blood and treasure? It was not the wisdom of the ruling classes, but the heroic resistance to their criminal folly by the working classes of England, that saved the west of Europe from plunging headlong into an infamous crusade for the propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic.

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

Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.