As in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.

While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.

When the sufferers learn to think, then the thinkers will learn to suffer.

It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.

The full man does not understand the wants of the hungry

Misery motivates, not utopia.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.