A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.

The social revolution...cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped itself of all superstitions concerning the past.

The unity of the bourgeoisie can be shaken only by the unity of the proletariat.

It would perhaps be as well if things were to remain quiet for a few years yet, so that all this 1848 democracy has time to rot away.

The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.