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.

Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.

Labor, being itself a commodity, is measured as such by the labor time needed to produce the labor-commodity. And what is needed to produce this labor-commodity? Just enough labor time to produce the objects indispensable to the constant maintenance of labor, that is, to keep the worker alive and in a condition to propagate his race. The natural price of labor is no other than the wage minimum.

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.

It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving - as if it were an individual person - its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.

Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.

Parliamentary cretinism: that peculiar malady which since 1848 has raged all over the Continent, which holds those infected by it fast in an imaginary world and robs them of all sense, all memory, all understanding of the rude external world.