The rule of the bourgeois democrats [in pre-federal Germany], from the very first, will carry within it the seeds of its own destruction

There is no greater stupidity than for people...to marry and so surrender themselves to the small miseries of domestic and private 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.

Luxury is the opposite of the naturally necessary.

Although gold and silver are not by nature money, money is by nature gold and silver.

Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

Perseus wore a magic cap that the monsters he hunted down might not see him. We draw the magic cap down over eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.